High tech and hot pot, p.3
High Tech and Hot Pot, page 3
I pay and head to the games tables. I studied the rules for sic bo on the internet; they are quite simple: Three dice and the player bets on the total. You can also try to predict the exact total, three twos or three threes or individual dice calls. The possible returns vary according to the probability. Most of the betting, however, is on xiao or da, small or big, totals of up to and including ten and numbers from eleven upwards. The payout, if you win, is double the stake.
For 1,000 MOP I can get 1,000 HKD (US$127) in chips. I then go to a table where there are already a number of people and place 300 HKD on da, big.
The dice clatter, the croupier lifts the golden shaker: five, five and six—altogether sixteen. I won! If I were clever, I would stop then, but of course I carry on. Next round I place three hundred on xiao, small, and then three hundred on odd number and lose both times.
Frustrated, I take a short break, but in my mind I continue playing. The mean thing about games of chance is the simplicity, the mind games. The gambler mentality doesn’t come about when playing but during the times between. I begin to imagine recognizing patterns in the results, having the situation under control. In this fantasy, I place massive bets and interpret every result as confirmation of my expertise: Look, I would have won a fortune there, or Ha, really clever to have skipped that round. That, by the way, is a very Western view of the games table. According to surveys, we are more likely to believe that destiny lies in our own hands than the Chinese, who view destiny as an external force that can only be influenced indirectly with the aid of good luck charms.
On we go. Three hundred on xiao: won; three hundred on da: won again. Have I managed to see through sic bo? Will this run of luck last forever? I will never know, because I quit and get my 1,300 HKD. My winnings? Roughly US$38. Just enough for a ticket to the mainland.
Megacities That (Almost) Nobody Knows
City Population
1 Zhengzhou, Henan province 10.1 million
2 Jinan, Shandong province 8.7 million
3 Shenyang, Liaoning province 8.3 million
4 Dongguan, Guangdong province 8.2 million
5 Changchun, Jilin province 7.7 million
6 Tangshan, Hebei province 7.5 million
7 Shantou, Guangdong province 5.4 million
8 Guiyang, Guizhou province 4.7 million
9 Changzhou, Jiangsu province 4.6 million
10 Taiyuan, Shanxi province 4.2 million
Then I take a look at Venice, which is just one escalator up and consists of long aisles with Gothic facades housing high-fashion and handbag shops. Even the Grand Canal has been reproduced, the bright blue waters traversed by gondoliers who churn out opera arias surprisingly adeptly. They sing “’O sole mio” with no sun in sight, but instead an illuminated ceiling simulates radiantly blue sky with cotton-ball clouds. This is surely popular. There was once a survey of Chinese travel bloggers on what they liked about Europe and “blue sky” was very high on the list, as it is a rare phenomenon here.
Tourist groups from Shanghai and Chengdu are gathered at the St. Mark’s Square repro, wearing red caps and taking photos just like the many Chinese tourists at the real thing. Behind the facades they can shop at Victoria’s Secret, Swarovski or Koi Kei Bakery. All the sales staff speak their language, the selfie backgrounds are sensational and Chinese food tastes better here than in Europe, which begs the question, why go to the real Italy?
Later, May tells me about her brother and sisters who really wouldn’t find a convincing argument for going there. “They are not interested in the world outside, just in shopping and consumption. Although they had the chance, they chose not to study abroad. I don’t understand them, and they don’t understand me,” she explains.
She has four sisters and one brother and is the second youngest. Her parents were not particularly fond of China’s one-child policy. “When I was a baby there were no computers and my mother was clever. She always claimed at the administrative offices that we had moved a few times and that the receipts for the paid fines for the extra children had been mislaid. We never had to pay.”
We drive to the southern neighborhood of Coloane in her angular Toyota minivan. Past bamboo scaffolding and green latticed awnings behind which a new, grand building is emerging. Past already existing grand buildings, symbols of a wealth that seemed unthinkable here a few decades ago.
May talks of her father. Although this modest, reflective young lady doesn’t seem to fit in with the new Macau, her family’s story is typical of the rapid growth of the region. “My father came from a village in the Guangdong province where he only went to elementary school. His family was poor, as everyone was then. First of all, he worked for a butcher, then as a delivery boy taking goods on his motorbike to the nearest city: Zhaoqing.”
We drive past a row of huge letters at the side of the road, which spell out: “City of Dreams.”
“My dad noticed that there were very few motorbikes with loading space to transport things from the village to the city,” May continues. “So he took out credit, bought a couple of bikes and employed a couple of riders.”
Outside, the sunlight is reflected in the blue glass of the Studio City casino complex. At the center of the eight-building compound are the rotating passenger pods of a Ferris wheel in the form of the Chinese lucky number eight. So, just like the punters behind the glass placing their bets on da or xiao, May’s father took out credit for motorbikes as a bet on the future, but having the right instinct was the deciding factor, not just relying on pure luck.
“For the first time in his life, my father had a decent income. He also noticed how society was changing and new demands were emerging. People wanted to have their own motorbikes. In the mid-eighties, he opened up a shop named xingfu motuoche—motorbikes of joy—which sold motorbikes with space for transporting goods. If you mention the name in my village today, everybody knows it.”
As if to underline her words, on our right, next to a golf course, a couple of go-karts having a race buzz past.
“He earned enough money to move to the city. There he started dealing in real estate. He bought land, built high-rises and sold apartments.”
“Casinos, too?”
“No, he would never do that. My parents think gambling is dishonest. They are sad that my brother has recently gotten a job in a casino, even though he only works in the bonus points department.”
May parks the car near the sea promenade. Coloane, once the most southerly island of the city-state but now linked to the rest, couldn’t feel more different from the world of high-rise buildings only a five-minute drive away. It has the feel of a fishing village, with colonial buildings, small alleyways, a Christian chapel and a number of Taoist temples. A couple of streets are untarred dirt tracks, and on the shore sit the abandoned ruins of the huge Lai Chi Vun shipyard. Up to well into the 1990s, thousands of craftsmen built wooden fishing junks here, but then the competition from the mainland, with their metal boats and automated manufacturing processes, became too stiff. Only the steel skeleton remains of the Coloane dockyard halls. They act as outdated memorials to a brutal competitive rivalry in which aesthetics and honest craftsmanship came second. Massive planks and bits of corrugated iron are lying around, and it stinks of damp wood and solvents.
We sit in a café that once provided the workers with cookies and warm drinks and now sells tourists coffee with condensed milk. A picture of Mao Zedong hangs on the wall, with the wish that he will live to be ten thousand years old. In his day, shipbuilding here was still flourishing.
“Probably the ruins of the wharf will be demolished soon,” says May resignedly. “They want to build an amusement park so that even more tourists will come here.”
From: Simone Shenzhen
Hi Stephan, we would be happy to invite you to Shenzhen:)
We have 5 cats and you would have to share a small living room with them. Is that ok for you?
Greetings, Simone and Diego
To: Simone Shenzhen
I like cats, sounds interesting! Thanks for the invitation and see you soon!
SHENZHEN
Population: 12.5 million
Province: Guangdong
THE ELECTRIC CITY
MAY DRIVES ME back to the ferry terminal, where we say our good-byes. I buy a ticket with my casino winnings and board a blue-and-white hydrofoil called Xunlong 3 bound for Shenzhen. As everyone talks of “mainland China,” I rather liked the idea of reaching this mysterious entity by boat. On top of this, I knew as a kid that China should always be approached by sea routes, because that’s the way they do it in the popular German children’s novel Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver.
The seats are blotched, it smells like vomit and noodle soup, and mud-colored waves raise and lower the boat in four-four time. Plastic red letters dangle from the ceiling wishing everyone a “Happy Spring Festival.” To begin, we speed alongside the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge, a road link over artificial islands and a tunnel totaling some thirty-five miles. As if there weren’t enough ways of reaching Macau, they built the longest fixed link in the world right here.
There is an ad from the producers of face masks being shown on a TV screen, and in my head the poetic English subtitles blend with beat of the ship’s hull: “International Assembly. Aseptic Packaging. Founder Chen. Customer Feedback. You Deserve It.”
Ah, yes, the face. My gaofushuai mission. In Macau, the fu part didn’t really work out, so let’s see what I can do for the visuals—the shuai. My cell phone signals a notification—“low security” on Wi-Fi, but the transmission quality is perfect. Breaking news informs me that the Chinese National People’s Congress has voted to lift the presidential two-term limit for Xi Jinping. Now, he can remain in power until he dies. Well, haven’t I chosen an interesting day for my arrival?
I open the Pitu app, which greets me with the message: “Please put your face in the frame.” A rectangular frame appears on the screen, and by the third attempt, I manage to make a reasonably realistic self-portrait. Now I have hundreds of ways of morphing my face onto those of movie stars, comic figures or legendary heroes. There are categories like “Demigods and Demons,” “Christmas Dreams” and “Springtime Beauty.” Such childish nonsense, I’m really much too old for all this. But just for the sake of trying, I transform my digital alter ego into an ancient Chinese swordsman, an elf with spiky ears, Bran from Game of Thrones, a chubby baby and a rapper in a Bruce Lee T-shirt (in my mind, I keep hearing the words: Customer feedback. You deserve it.).
On the screen my skin is very pink, the eyes slightly larger than life and the eyebrows perfectly plucked. Everything is automatically optimized, and I look ten years younger. As this kind of brutal beautification is highly trendy in China, it has its own term: wanghonglian, which roughly translated means: “internet celebrity face.” You wouldn’t be able to recognize many stars in real life because their online identities appear doe-eyed and soft-focused. With my skincare cream model’s face, and in the traditional clothing of the Zhuang ethnic group, I already feel very Chinese and save my new profile picture in the messenger program WeChat.
When I look up from my cell phone forty-five minutes later, we are just off Shenzhen. To the right, silos and red-and-white-striped chimneys; to the left, derricks and shipping containers. The skyline of the megacity that is home to 12 million looks glassy and cold in the mist, but soon a huge terminal painted in five colors takes up the field of vision. We dock near the equally large Costa Atlantica, one of many European ships that are used exclusively in China. Worldwide there is no cruise ship market that is growing faster, with the number of passengers carried already second place behind the USA.
I pass through the Temperature Monitoring facility, which automatically measures the body temperature of arrivals, and am then led to the fingerprint machine. “Welcome to China” appears on the screen. Left hand. Right hand. Both thumbs. I wonder whether someone cleans the glass before the next arrival slaps their fingers on it.
At passport counter number five, the one for “foreigners,” the official wants another print of my thumb to compare it with the automated image. He scans my passport but doesn’t look at my face, because matching is done by a high-resolution camera. After I get two stamps and my passport back, a console with a touch screen prompts me to assess the official: “Perfect,” “Good,” “Took too long,” or “Bad service.” I choose “Perfect,” and I’m through.
A silent shuttle bus takes me to the Shekou Port subway station. In Shenzhen, all 16,359 public buses have been battery powered since January 2018. An equally silent escalator takes me to the subway security gates. The train cars, as clean as a hospital floor, are covered in ads for the newest electric SUVs from a company called GAC Motors.
I get out after two stops. Up on the main street I see a number of angular blue e-cabs from BYD, a company from Shenzhen that began by making batteries and later the cars for them to go into. Roughly 12,500 municipal cabs already use rechargeable batteries, which is one hundred times as many as in all of Germany at the moment.
There is no place that symbolizes China’s boom better than Shenzhen. The once sleepy fishing village on the south Chinese coast received its town charter only in 1980, and the government created a special economic zone there to compete with Hong Kong in the distant future. Quite an ambitious idea—the still British colony had 5 million inhabitants then; Shenzhen, with thirty thousand, was hardly more than a village. “Let in the West Wind. Wealth is glorious,”1 was the motto of Deng Xiaoping, who was the leader of the Communist Party after Mao Zedong’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution.
Under his leadership, between 1978 and 1992, China began a new era geared towards capitalism. In Shenzhen, firms and jobs were created, and the value of property multiplied; the locals could sell their land for state construction projects for incredible sums. Shenzhen has become the only place in China where an affirmative answer to the question “Are you from the village?” is guaranteed to gain great respect from the person making the inquiry because they are probably talking to a millionaire. The city authorities built highways and tower blocks, wanting to be modern at all costs. Sometimes they went a bit too far—for example, wanting to ban bikes completely for being old-fashioned.
This development, at least, has been revoked. On every corner now there are hire bikes; in one side street they are even piled on top of one another—about a hundred yellow and silvery-orange specimens. The market leaders, Ofo and Mobike, operate without docking stations, just with GPS, and clients can abandon them wherever they wish within the city limits. This is practical, but it has its disadvantages, as during the night, transporters gather the bikes up for the sake of tidiness, but the companies are still having trouble keeping up with demand. Although good for the environment, they often detract from the look of a neighborhood—the dilemma of wind turbines and solar panels now also applies to hire bikes.
At the prearranged street corner, Simone and Diego approach: two cheery-looking figures around thirty, wearing shorts and sneakers. Simone’s given name is Zidan, but like many people of her generation, she chose a second Western name when she started learning English. The results often sound as though the English-language novices experimented with LSD for inspiration, choosing names like Sugar, Honey, Candy, Bunny, Happy, Flower or Monday. Diego, however, was given his name at birth; he’s from Colombia and lived in England for quite a while. In Shenzhen, he works as an advertising video producer, and Simone is an art teacher.
The usual getting-to-know-you small talk is dropped, as I meet the couple in the middle of a lively discussion about Snow White. Simone thinks that the fairy tale is totally unsuitable for children. “The prince kisses a dead minor, so it’s about both pedophilia and necrophilia. What’s wrong with you Europeans?” She shoots a critical look in my direction.
I can’t think of a convincing argument, so I try a few whataboutisms: “Come on, you Chinese change the words of ‘Frère Jacques’ to make a song poking fun at disabled animals. What are kids supposed to learn from that?” The Chinese text I learned in a language course goes like this: “Two big tigers, two big tigers, run very fast, run very fast, one of them has no eyes, one of them has no tail, what a laugh, what a laugh.”
“Probably there is some hidden truth about both our countries lurking in there somewhere,” says Simone, who studied in Switzerland for a couple of years.
There is no doubt about her love for animals. A rattling escalator brings us to their apartment on the eleventh floor of a weather-beaten high-rise where I get to know Mitzi, Munchi, Alba, Pickwick and Pumpkin, the four-legged roommates with whom I will be sharing the living room. Every possible place to sit is so thick with cat fur that my merino sweater now knows how it feels to be a schnitzel coated in breadcrumbs. But I was warned, and I’m well aware that I haven’t booked into a five-star hotel. The sofa and bookshelves have been made catproof with blankets. There is an opulent mouse-gray scratching post in one corner and three closed designer litter boxes look like three parallel robot heads made of white plastic. Three adults and five animals in 430 square feet—it sure is going to be cozy.
But first, we ride the subway downtown for a couple of craft beers at the Glass Hammer Brewing Co. In the style of a British pub, with meager lighting, it has a thirty-foot-long bar and offers forty-six beers from the barrel, most produced in the house brewery. We find a table on the veranda with a view of the metallic facade of the 115-story Ping An skyscraper, which after Shanghai Tower, is the second-tallest building in China and the fourth tallest in the world. The bar next door has aquariums housing real sharks integrated into its facade. We order beers called Forgotten Dreams and Wonderwall, and Simone asks the waiter whether there is a power bank to charge her cell phone. “I think I have enough points not to have to leave a deposit,” she says. The waiter scans her phone and she does have enough—more than 700 from a possible 950 points with Sesame Credit. And with that, she is considered trustworthy enough.
