High tech and hot pot, p.16
High Tech and Hot Pot, page 16
Her idea of Western countries is probably not more inaccurate than most Westerners’ concept of China. Most news reports and articles about China emphasize the bizarre, the extreme and the huge differences. But these stories are only one part of the truth.
In some regards, the developments in the Western world are not as different from China as we would like to think. We criticize China’s state-supported mania for collecting data but continue our daily use of Facebook and Google, both of which store data and are more powerful than quite a few countries. We are frightened of dictatorships but are currently experiencing a renaissance of populism and authoritarian leadership. We are shocked by state-sponsored manipulation of opinions but have yet to find a way to combat foreign propaganda campaigns that are trying to spread misinformation to influence public opinion. We are skeptical of topics like total surveillance but have to ask ourselves to what extent are we willing to ignore the technological options available for something like crime prevention.
The bus has been following a river for quite some time now, and the villages are becoming smaller and look more traditional. The piles of concrete on the far riverbank, the precursors of a new railway line, look like an ugly intrusion of modernity. Qing describes a TV program about police work in which, thanks to the most advanced technology, the thieves and murderers are caught within minutes of their crimes. This is how propaganda works: inside the country, prime examples of the benefits of surveillance, and from abroad, reports about attacks on Chinese tourists.
We get out at the picturesque village of Jidao, walk down to the river and cross a bridge to reach our homestay. We hear the sound of trumpets and see a group of locals coming slowly towards us. The women have their hair done up in small balloon-like buns and are wearing bright clothing; the men are wearing blazers and cloth pants. In the middle, some men are bearing a wooden coffin covered in pink cloth towards the boundary of the village.
“He was only fifty but seriously ill,” says our host, an elderly woman in a traditional Miao outfit who also has an impressive bun. “Six pigs were slaughtered today in his honor.”
We deposit our backpacks in a tidy room with plenty of light-colored wood, push the twin beds together and then set off on a hike through the woods to the next village: Langde.
On arrival, Qing is surprised to discover that there is an entrance fee of sixty yuan (US$8.50). The last time she was here it was free. She asks a local if there is any way around paying the fee.
“Just go to the other entrance to the village and come in from there. I don’t know why it costs something to enter—it’s just a village,” he answers cheerfully. “Do you want to have a drink with me? I’m looking for drinking companions!” He has slightly wayward, glassy eyes, and we politely decline his invitation.
We skirt around the village for a couple hundred yards and enter from the other side. We pass silver stores, quaint old houses and a venue for public dance events, and then head to a restaurant with simple wooden tables. It is a little early for dinner, but the owner says he is prepared to cook for us. On the wall is the obligatory kitchen grading by the hygiene authorities: a somewhat unhappy-looking smiley face doesn’t seem to match a B grade. Taking a closer look, I notice that it was pasted over an inferior C grade. Instant karma—visitors who skimp on the entrance fee are, in return, fleeced at supper.
You often hear that nobody trusts anybody in China, and I’m beginning to understand why. Qing says that online fraud is a huge problem. “Recently, my best friend wrote on WeChat that he had no money in his cell phone account and asked if I could quickly transfer two hundred yuan [thirty dollars] to him. Luckily, I didn’t do it, as his account had been hacked.”
We have time to talk, as the cook takes an eternity to rustle up a meal consisting of a bit of rice, some vegetables and some pork. Outside, a chicken wanders by, as do some kids wearing old-fashioned pants with open crotches that make diapers unnecessary—practical, but they do have disadvantages.
“Scams also happen without the internet,” says Qing. “For example, a lot of old folks buy fake medication that claims to make you live to a hundred. They believe what is promised at shady advertising events. First, they are offered lots of free tests—blood pressure and so on. The waiting room is like a meeting place for seniors, with people chatting pleasantly. And the young staff in their doctor’s getup look like perfect sons and daughters and are super friendly. Some of the old folks know that they are being cheated, but they don’t think it’s so bad because it feels nice to speak to these people.”
After an age, the owner manages to place a warm bottle of Snow beer on the table.
“Shall I help you in the kitchen?” offers Qing, but her assistance is grumpily rejected.
“My mom was a victim of a fraud,” she continues. “She was really stupid, I’m sorry to say.” Qing’s mother, who is anything but fond of traveling, suddenly announced that she was going to fly to Taiwan soon; indeed, the trip was apparently by invitation from the government there for her entire square dancing group. The patron of the enterprise was supposed to be none other than a grandson of former president Chiang Kai-shek.
“Old people have this romantic idea of Taiwan as an island of miracles that is naturally part of China, like a missing member of the family. We love Taiwan, and Taiwan loves us—that’s what we learn in school.”
Qing asked about the route, but her mother didn’t know. “However, she had already paid the money to some woman, not an agency. I was very suspicious. I advised her to ask about the route and to threaten to demand a refund.”
But the operators refused to repay anything. “They even told her: ‘You are the black sheep here. Everyone else is looking forward to the trip, and you’re causing trouble. It is an honor to be invited by the government of our sister country!’”
This story reminds me of the other mother, the mother of Lin, the artist in Beijing. Her argument with her daughter sounded similar: people who step out of line are wrong; a good nail doesn’t stick out.
“Mom’s money was gone. Of course, she could have simply stayed at home, but she didn’t want to let the scammers win,” says Qing.
So she would rather go along and try to enjoy it somehow. Immediately on arrival at Taipei airport, however, it became apparent that something wasn’t right. The promised official reception didn’t take place; instead, the tour guide held up his cell phone, played a recorded trumpet fanfare and said a few nice words. The group had supposedly been invited to a grand banquet, and everybody was dressed up for it, but then there was no one there except their group. They went to a “famous local restaurant” that offered only substandard cold food.
“And they had paid the price of a luxury trip. They never saw a government representative. So funny.”
Our food finally arrives after more than forty minutes. It doesn’t taste particularly good.
“I’m going to give this restaurant a bad review,” says Qing.
• • • • • •
CHINESE TOUR OPERATORS treat old villages like start-ups. They build little ticket booths, employ staff and encourage restaurateurs, store owners and hoteliers from elsewhere to set up shop there. A small share of the entrance money, maybe 5 percent, goes to the villagers. The rest finances renovations, with shares paid to the provincial government, and sometimes a little bribe to a particularly enterprising village councillor. However, the lion’s share goes to the investor.
If hordes of visitors come, then it is a gold mine; if not, then the investor will swiftly move on, dismantling the ticket booth, and the village must once again cope alone.
“I don’t think Langde will last that long. There are more famous villages with better attractions nearby. Why should people want to come here?” says Qing.
We hitchhike back to our accommodation with the young driver of a sand transporter. “Truckers are perfect for a lift,” says traveling pro Qing. “They are bored with their routine, and they are not afraid of being robbed because everyone knows that they hardly earn anything.”
The next morning Qing has bad news. An important meeting at work has been arranged spontaneously and she has to travel back earlier than planned, so we have just one more day. She suggests going back to the city.
“We can do that,” I say. “Would you like to take a look at the new high-tech amusement park?”
“No.”
“It’s supposed to be amazing—the largest virtual reality park in the whole world.”
“Sounds super boring.”
She does a bit of online research. “Visitors say that a lot of attractions aren’t open yet, that you have to wait four hours for two minutes on a roller coaster and that the entrance fee is expensive.”
“I will pay for both of us.”
“Go there alone.”
“That’s stupid. We have such little time left.”
“Then let’s go to a karaoke bar.”
“I can’t sing.”
The discussion continues for a few minutes, until one of us finally gets their way.
A few hours later, we are walking through Guiyang searching for KTV establishments. The first candidate has a spectacular entrance made of fake marble and a smartly dressed elevator boy who brings us in an elevator full of golden mirrors to the first floor, where two heavily made-up ladies in miniskirts are standing behind a small bar. Sadly, there is no room for another two singers, they tell us.
“You could sing with one of the women, or if you pay a bit more, you could even take her home,” says Qing, my China explainer.
In the neighborhood there are a number of karaoke bars, each with their own enticing slogan, from “Music: the endless drink” (Man KTV) to “Happy every day” (Xin Chang KTV). Qing finds a good online offer for the former: 168 yuan (twenty-five dollars) for four hours, including eight bottles of beer and snacks.
A staff member escorts us to cabin A52. On the yellowish wooden wall hangs an expressionistic print of a saxophonist and a cellist in an oversized silver frame. There is a long black leather couch and, on the table next to a dice shaker, two mics with red and a blue LED lights on a golden base. A waiter knocks and brings in a tray full of sliced melon, cocktail tomatoes and filleted fish, a huge bucket of popcorn and eight bottles of Snow beer. On the wall, there are two screens: a smaller one for song selection and a larger one for the sing-along videos.
Qing starts off singing along with plenty of echo and lots of gusto to a Teresa Teng classic: “The Moon Represents My Heart.” To simulate the effect Teresa has on her audience, take an injection of custard in the arm, then fill a swimming pool with plenty of cotton candy and get in. While sinking deeper and deeper into the pink sugary goo, eat half a marshmallow cake. In other words, much as you would like to, it is impossible to resist the tempting sugariness of this song; at some point, it will suck you in, plant itself in your head and never leave.
The imagery and the quality of the video are less convincing, but after every line, a live overlay gives an evaluation of how precise the length and pitch of the singer’s tone were. “Good” or “perfect” is faded in, or “combo ×3,” or “combo ×4” when a number of verses worked out well. At the end, there is a digitally determined percentage—anything over 80 is pretty good, and above 90 is excellent.
Luckily, this function isn’t available for the English songs. The reverb is the acoustic equivalent of exaggerated digital photo optimization—it makes every voice sound twenty-five years younger. I have a go at “Wonderwall,” “Lemon Tree” and “Moon River”—the selection is not particularly extensive. Searching for a song is complicated because it takes me a while to understand the logic of the system. You have to type in not the song title but rather the initials, so “WAY” for “We Are Young” or “BR” for “Bad Romance.”
Thanks to the beer, and Qing’s company, it is a wonderful evening, overshadowed by the fact that our time together is coming to an end; tomorrow she must return, and afterwards we will not meet again. After all, she has a husband and child in Shenzhen, and I won’t be flying back to China in the foreseeable future. So this is to be our farewell, in the kitschy atmosphere of cabin A52, with melon snacks and watery beer and songs about eternal love.
• • • • • •
THE NEXT MORNING I take her to the station, and the I am alone again. What should I do to protect myself against the wrench of farewell? Virtual distraction and escape to fantasy worlds, what else? So it’s off to the edge of town, to Oriental Science Fiction Valley!
I take a cab there and walk across a construction site to get to the entrance, where a staff member in a light blue uniform scans my ticket. I marvel at an over-150-foot-high Transformers figure and race through the night of a future city in a flying car. Then I get stuck in a carriage. In my virtual reality headset I can only see a sinister room from which there seems to be no escape—definitely not the experience that the ambitious high-tech city of Guiyang wishes to present to its guests. Just as I am considering getting out of the carriage and walking along the track to the door, my vehicle judders into motion. A couple of yards farther on, it stops again. On the screen of my glasses I can read an error prompt that I can close by blinking my eyes. And then I’m back in the room with the gray walls. What a miserable place to sit and think about how I’m missing Qing. After what feels like an eternity, the carriage starts moving again, and this time, it actually reaches the door. I’m back in the real, illusory world, the one planned by park designers, with smiling staff members, bright-colored lights and spaceship-like buildings.
The sun peeps out from behind the clouds, happy families lick their ice cream and a wide-eyed kid unpacks the robot his dad bought him. At the roadside, cyborgs stand silently observing the happy goings-on.
The place that is best suited to drag me back from the future to the present is the old station in the center of Guiyang. Next to the main road and a bit below, beneath a hodgepodge of electric cables, is a dingy alleyway with thirteen-yuan (two-dollar) all-you-can-eat stands that smell of cheap fat, palm readers, massage parlors and, along the darkest stretch (sixty feet without any electric lighting at all) sex workers in filthy doorways to rooms you just don’t want to think about.
I have a long journey ahead of me, so I buy some digestive cookies, “soft French bread” (more plastic packaging than bread), peanuts, two cans of Tsingtao beer, a 1.555-liter bottle of C’est Bon water and pickled paprika-beef instant noodles in a cardboard container. A word to the wise: never buy the cheapest instant noodles on the shelf; the extra thirty cents are well spent. Also, beware of packages with cartoons of crying or sweating chilies. With my provisions in plastic bags, I head for my platform.
Log of a Largely Uneventful Train Journey From Guiyang to Kunming
6:02 PM
Seat 68 in car 17 located. The travel experiment can begin—booked the slowest connection between Guiyang and Kunming, almost eleven hours for 396 miles, night train, cheapest seating category. The seats are hard and the windows look as if they were last cleaned during the Ming dynasty.
6:09 PM
The K433 rolls punctually out of the station. Opposite: two young men, mid-twenties. One of them offers me pink chewing gum that I gratefully accept.
6:13 PM
On seat 54, a tanned man works on his cheeks with an electric razor, as if to say that it’s perfectly natural to shave at 6:13 PM on the K433.
6:15 PM
The woman in seat 62 is transporting a curtain rail in her hand and wearing track pants that are exactly the same color as the chewing gum in my mouth. She knows nothing of the coincidence, and I refrain from pointing it out.
6:24 PM
A fruit seller treks along the aisle and offers, “Wu kuai liang bao”—two bags for five yuan (seventy-five cents). Nobody buys anything, and there is no visible indication on his face of whether he is particularly disappointed or not.
6:31 PM
Another mobile gastronomy vendor makes an attempt with rice, vegetables, meat and two boiled egg halves presented on polystyrene plates. “Hao chi—good food,” he says, but that is not the first thing that comes to the mind of an objective observer.
6:52 PM
A number of fires, fortunately beyond the tracks—outside, burning bales of hay can be seen.
6:56 PM
“How much did your camera cost?” asks the chewing gum donor opposite. He is better dressed than me. “Eight thousand yuan,” I answer. This is not the truth; it was considerably more expensive than eleven hundred U.S. dollars.
6:57 PM
His name is Wang Yahong, and his next questions are: “Where did you buy your ticket, on the internet?” and “Have you been on the high-speed train?” What he actually wants to know is what the hell a foreigner is doing on the cheap train.
6:59 PM
The ticket cost eighty-six yuan, about $12.50. The high-speed train would have been three times the price but only taken two hours, as it takes the most direct route.
7:12 PM
A passenger, male, mid-forties, strolls along the aisle, looks at me, stops, looks towards the window, then back at me, thinks things over, looks again and moves on.
7:22 PM
Train stops at Anshun, population 2.3 million. Never heard of it.
7:57 PM
A tubby gentleman in a suit and white shirt with polka dots sits opposite me and begins a conversation. The first sentence that I understand is: “You should find a Chinese wife.”
7:58 PM
If my Chinese were better I would have answered: “The surplus of men in this country is somewhere around 40 million. Shouldn’t you be a little more protectionist as far as your women are concerned?” Sadly, I don’t know what the word for “protectionist” is in Chinese.
7:59 PM
The language barrier makes the conversation difficult, so I suggest using the translating function on WeChat. A Wi-Fi dead zone hinders this initially.
8:26 PM
Reception back, general relief. Polka-dot man types a message, and I use the translate function on my phone.
