High tech and hot pot, p.2
High Tech and Hot Pot, page 2
A security guard leads me to a counter in the next room. A clerk sitting behind bulletproof glass prompts me, through a much-too-low slot, to place my hands on a rectangular, transparent plastic panel: four fingers of the right hand, four fingers of the left hand and then both thumbs. A green light signals that the prints have been registered.
I am then greeted by an employee, a man with a serious expression, a striped shirt and round glasses. Two Chinese women are shooed away from a tiny corner table and we sit down. They now have to stand but are allowed to listen in on our conversation.
In silence, he flicks through the copies of my visa application. Without wasting time on small talk, he begins the test.
“The person inviting you, Ms. Wang, is she your friend?”
“Yes, a friend.”
“A normal friend or. . . ?” A telling look, man to man.
“Normal friend,” I reply.
“You write travel books, about Russia and Iran. You are really famous,” he says. The man is well informed, as there is no mention of my being an author in my application.
“Oh, no, not really famous,” I answer.
“Do you intend to write a book about China?”
“No,” I reply.
If I were to say anything else, he could demand I fill out an application for a journalist’s visa. A different office is responsible for this, and they don’t have a reputation for being particularly forthcoming. For the entire three-month trip, I would have to state in advance all the proposed topics to be covered and all the planned interview partners.
I can’t do that, as I have no idea yet who I am going to meet.
“Do you plan to travel a lot inside the country?”
“Just two cities: Shanghai and Chengdu,” I claim.
I want to travel right across the country, from the high-tech metropolis of Shenzhen to the capital Beijing, from the province of Liaoning on the border with North Korea to Yunnan province on the border with Myanmar.
“To Chengdu? With Ms. Wang?”
“No, alone. I want to eat plenty of hot pot there.”
“Can you eat spicy food?”
“Yes, but as spicy as in Sichuan? Not every day.”
Not even a hint of a smile. The subject of food normally works on all Chinese people; this man is apparently immune.
The two displaced ladies are now at the counter and talking excitedly through the glass panel; something seems to be wrong with their visa papers. Consulates are modern-day drawbridges. Here, fortresses are defended, people classified as “desirable” or “undesirable.” In China’s case, in particular, a consulate is also a place of maximum individuality, as here, and only here, is it suggested that in a country of 1.4 billion can one person actually make a difference.
Back to the questions.
“You were also in China in 2014—where exactly?”
“Shanghai, Beijing, Xi’an, Xinjiang province, once in a train straight across the country from east to west.”
“Where were you in Xinjiang?”
“In the capital, Ürümqi.”
“Aha, also in Kashgar?”
“Yes, also in Kashgar.”
“Are you planning to make another trip to Xinjiang?”
Xinjiang is the province in the northwest that is in crisis because the government has established “reeducation,” or internment, camps for Muslims as well as a surveillance system unequaled in the world. Here, China shows its ugly side.
Of course I want to go to Xinjiang.
“No,” I say. “Just Shanghai and Chengdu. Above all, I want to improve my language skills on this trip.”
“You will be hearing from the visa authorities.”
• • • • • •
MY DESIRE TO get to know China better doesn’t contradict Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism With Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, the collected wisdom of the head of state. But I still had to go through that charade at the consulate.
The future number one world power is concerned with one single traveler who is not seeking access to secret documents, is not intending to incite revolution, is not planning to murder anybody but just wants to travel a bit through the country and write down his experiences.
If the visa application is successful, then I think it will be a farewell visit, as it is highly unlikely that I will be able to get another one after the book is published. Because I want to know more about this country than they are willing to divulge. The word “understand” can be interpreted so differently.
I log on to the travel portal Couchsurfing.com to look for hosts. Globally, millions of members offer free accommodation, and more than 857,000 members are registered in China.
Yang is astonished at the high number. “Most Chinese don’t trust strangers,” she says when we meet again. “They trust their friends but not someone they have just met. I fear that this journey will be a traumatic experience for you.”
“Last time you said that once I was there, the sky’s the limit.”
“The one doesn’t exclude the other. But to be successful you have to first become gaofushuai.”
“What?”
“Gao fu shuai. Tall, rich and handsome. The Chinese term for a perfect man.”
Yang eyes up the mini kitchen in my two-room apartment, then me from top to bottom, and adds: “Well, you’re certainly tall.”
Okay, maybe the missing attributes can be corrected. For fu I decide to start my journey in the casino paradise of Macau. For shuai I download two Chinese photo editing apps called Pitu and MyIdol that promise beautifying filters and 3-D avatar creations. Additionally, I reserve a spot in a Chinese language course, get my respirator mask out of the closet, buy fifteen packs of Lübeck marzipan for my hosts and purchase a VPN program for my cell phone that will allow me to access blocked websites throughout the world.
One day in March, I receive the liberating call from the Chinese consulate in the posh Elbchaussee: my passport with visa awaits collection.
To: Yang Berlin
Hooray! It worked! I’m going to China!
From: Yang Berlin
Don’t forget to return with both kidneys haha
MACAU
Population: 667,000
Special Administrative Region
MILLIONAIRES IN TRACKSUITS
FOUR WEEKS LATER, I land at Macau International Airport, a rather small representative of its kind with only ten gates. Arriving there feels a bit like landing on an aircraft carrier, as, because of lack of space, the runway is on a 2.25-mile-long artificial island in the South China Sea. Compared to the other passengers, I appear tall, fair-haired and blue-eyed. And not particularly fu; many people are wearing wristwatches and carrying handbags costing many times the price of my plane ticket.
Everyone flocks to the free shuttle buses with colorful signs advertising Wynn Palace, Venetian or Grand Lisboa. You shouldn’t keep luck waiting, so why go to the hotel first when public transport will deliver you directly to the games table? Most casinos are integrated into large hotels with all the necessary frills available, so now staunch gamblers don’t even have to venture out into the bleak, smoggy springtime heat of the real world.
I contacted eight potential hosts, seven of whom, according to their profiles, were somehow connected professionally to casinos. I hoped to get some advice from them for my plan to become incredibly rich in a very short time. The eighth was May, and she hates casinos, and only she replied with an invitation to stay. Even host seeking is a game of chance here.
From May’s profile I know that she has traveled to twenty-five different countries, she works in the human resources department of an airline and she worships the filmmaker Wong Kar-wai. I liked her philosophy for life: Be like a child but not childish.
I still have a few hours before I’m going to meet up with her, so I take the bus to the Grand Lisboa. Casinos seem to be a good starting point on the long path to understanding China—money and superstition carry much weight here, so the players at the gaming tables must be fully in their element. On mainland China, gambling is forbidden, which is why there is an enormous crush here.
The gambling halls of Macau represent the frantic development of China in the last thirty years. Communist ideals are replaced by the chance for any individual to win a sudden ascent. There are ludicrous prospects of success alongside considerable risks, and the aim to assume a leading role worldwide—revenues from Macau’s casinos are almost five times those from Las Vegas. China’s special administrative region is roughly the size of Key West but has the third-largest gross domestic product per capita in the world.
Right next to the airport, the bus passes the construction site of a subway line with driverless trains that is due to start service in a couple of months and a brand-new ferry terminal with nineteen jetties and 127 passport control counters. Just at this terminal they are expecting 30 million visitors a year. Another passenger terminal can be found a bit farther north. The urban planners want tourists that are like the mah-jongg tiles at one of the fully automated tables—first there is a slight rumbling and clattering noise, then a hatch opens and there they are, ready all in a row so that the game can begin without delay.
Soon I can make out the illuminated skyline of the Macau peninsula beyond the oil-filmed waters.
The new Grand Lisboa casino stands out clearly amid the other skyscrapers, a building that manages, despite its blossom shape and gold lighting, to look as threatening as a huge god of vengeance made of concrete and glass.
The bus stops. I enter the perfumed entrance hall through some sliding doors and deposit my backpack at reception. One games table next to another stands on the deep pile red carpet, mostly offering baccarat and a Chinese dice game, sic bo. Also there are endless rows of slot machines with names like Mighty Dragon, Golden Goddess and Lucky Empress. Semispherical surveillance cameras hang from golden gantries, customers are reflected in brass-colored ATMs and in the shiny garbage cans, everything glistens and blinks, beckons and promises. There is no dress code, which is why unrestrained people-watching comes directly after trying to get incredibly rich as the second-best way to pass time in the Grand Lisboa.
Without claiming to be empirically exact, I discover that those wearing business suits have the worst manners, that men in athletic gear compensate for being underdressed by placing high bets and that sporting an NBA tank top with a Breitling wristwatch is just as acceptable as using a Hello Kitty handbag as a receptacle for your gaming chips worth as much as a three-room apartment. I watch as a young man, not even twenty-five years old and wearing a hoodie, yawns frequently while placing 15,000 Hong Kong dollar chips (US$1,900) per game—for some reason, HKD are used instead of Macau pataca (MOP). In turns, and with panache, he slams his chip and then the game-deciding card down on the baize.
After three unsuccessful rounds of baccarat in a row, he has no chips in front of him, just a credit card, which he gathers before slowly strolling towards the cashier’s window. I stroll, in turn, towards the exit to take a cab to my prearranged meeting place with May.
My destination is the southern end of the Ponte da Amizade, or Friendship Bridge. Streets still bear Portuguese names, though most people speak Cantonese. The city-state was a Portuguese colony for 442 years and has belonged to China again only since 1999.
A young woman in a floral dress with black straps and a stiff white blouse approaches me waving. I will never understand why people who are less than a few feet away from each other need to wave at each other. But here I’m obviously thinking too European; in Asia, handshakes are not so common.
“Hello May, nice to meet you!” I say, and with a slight delay, wave back.
“Same here! I hope you haven’t come to gamble,” she says.
“What have you got against casinos?” I ask.
“They are ruining the city. Many of the locals don’t even bother going to university because jobs in the casinos are much more lucrative. And all these new buildings are not good for wildlife. In winter, rare birds from Siberia come here, but because of the light pollution, there are fewer and fewer every year.”
We pass a security guard and enter May’s housing estate, consisting of twelve almost identical high-rise buildings, an outdoor swimming pool and a tennis court with Astroturf. We reach the entranceway with a polished marble floor framed by two Greek columns; next to the elevator is an oil painting of a female cellist in a gold frame hanging a bit askew.
Her apartment on the eighth floor seems equally opulent, with expensive parquet floor, leather sofas and a huge TV. The housekeeper is hanging up clothes on the balcony. May lives here with her brother, whom I don’t get to meet. In one corner is a cabinet full of cups, medals and commendations for special accomplishments at school.
“All yours?” I ask.
“Roughly half of them,” she says, but her smile, half-modest, half-proud, suggests that she is minimizing.
“I was a goody-goody.”
“A what?”
“A goody-goody, teacher’s pet. I always had the best grades.”
When speaking, May often rubs her chin or nods devoutly, which looks very erudite. She’s twenty-eight and speaks perfect American English; she studied linguistics in Portland, Oregon, for a couple of years.
She leads me through an enormous kitchen to a small room that will be mine for the next two days. There is a bed and a couple of shelves with kettles, irons and cleaning materials.
We take a cab into the old part of the city of Taipa, which is only a few minutes’ walk away from the largest casino district. Taipa is one of the original three separate Macau islands, which have since been linked by land reclamation schemes and bridges. Because it lacks tall buildings, Taipa adds nothing to Macau’s skyline, but it does have quaint little alleyways with pubs and shops offering almond cookies, herbal teas and cigarettes with obvious typos in their brand names.
We reach a wonderful park with croaking frogs and chirping cicadas. “This is Macau. A mixture of old and new, natural and artificial, beauty and craziness,” says May. She points to the flashing gambling hotels. “A couple of decades ago, that was all sea.” Where the oyster fishers were once the only ones trying their luck, is now covered by a number of square miles of artificial land for the casinos.
Keeping vigil in the park is a golden statue of the Portuguese poet and adventurer Luís de Camões, who was a chief warrant officer in Macau in the sixteenth century. I ask, half-jokingly, whether he was a gambler.
“He traveled by ship between Europe and Asia—in his time, that was similar to gambling but more like Russian roulette,” she replies.
The golden-floodlit Camões is holding his head down as if he can’t bear the view of the casinos and one hand up, with fingers spread, in a silent eternal reproach. What on earth have you done to my city?
“The famous Portuguese saudade, a kind of melancholy and nostalgia, runs through many of his works,” says May.
I ask her what she yearns for when she gazes at her city.
“I would love to live in Europe, because there are so many good museums there,” she says.
• • • • • •
THE NEXT DAY, after May has gone to work, I go to the biggest casino in the world. The Venetian Macau is a bigger copy of the Las Vegas Venetian, which copied the architecture of the Italian city of Venice, and this is saying quite a lot about the global shift in aspirations of economic supremacy.
The complex is built on sand; more than 1 million tons were deposited here. In addition to the actual hotel building, which is boomerang shaped, there is a crimson replica of St. Mark’s Campanile. From here, after crossing the Rialto Bridge, you can be at the Eiffel Tower in five minutes by foot. In front of me unfolds a perfect reproduction of the Doge’s Palace, and by the main entrance, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons emanate from loudspeakers attached to a lamppost. Between Gothic pillars (left and right); polished marble (below); and vivid, luminous ceiling paintings featuring heroes, goddesses and horses (above), I work my way to the North restaurant near the casino entrance.
Red lanterns at the windows, red porcelain on the tables and red silk waistcoats on the waitresses all make it patently clear what the lucky color is here. Superstitious Chinese people wear red underwear while gambling and know a couple of other tricks that apparently increase their chances of winning: leaving lights on in the hotel room, never entering a casino through the main entrance and, on the way there, not meeting a monk or a nun. Also, newly opened games palaces promise less success than those that are a few years old.
With so much red in the restaurant there can be little doubt about my impending wealth, and correspondingly, the waitress opens the menu to a list of spirits from the last century. The fifty-year-old Kweichow Moutai, at 53 percent alcohol, costs just over US$9,000. I decide this is a good time to get used to the customary hot water with my meal, which comes without charge. I order a portion of mapo doufu, a popular spicy dish from Sichuan province, to go with it.
The guests at the other tables, deep in concentration, are working through illustrated menus, acting more like addicts than people seeking information, rapidly leafing from one page to the next, so that the transition wastes as few hundredths of a second as possible, faces almost touching the laminated sheets as if every detail could be definitive. No single moment should be squandered on non-viewing of the dishes. Those familiar with Chinese cuisine can appreciate this fully. By “Chinese cuisine,” I don’t mean the sweet-and-sour-pork-MSG-laden-fortune-cookie dives where every order of B1 or M4 is an insult to the cultural heritage of the homeland, mostly under the auspices of an outwardly-stoically-doing-what-it-is-supposed-to-be-doing-but-inwardly-depressed beckoning cat. Next time you see one, look a little more closely at its face; you don’t need a degree in psychology to sense the sadness.
But back to the place where they make Chinese food properly. Mapo doufu consists of minced pork, tofu and Sichuan pepper that, when seasoned skillfully, creates a quasi-erotic mélange for diners. With each bite, the lips tingle a bit more, almost to the point of numbness. Ideally, like today, the spiciness is calibrated such that the consumer occasionally has to raise his nose but is not reduced to tears. The tingling sensation returns now and then after the meal, but gradually, the waves become weaker. I wonder how often I would have to eat mapo doufu to always have the tingling effect, but it would make for a life that was pretty low on vitamins.
