High tech and hot pot, p.6
High Tech and Hot Pot, page 6
I thought that the lack of space was going to be the main problem during the night, but I didn’t know anything about the midges then: a continuous whirring at the ears, in the ears, around the ears makes it impossible to think of sleeping. There isn’t a Chinese saying that goes something like, “Ten midges are worse than five cats,” but it is still true. Almost every ten seconds Yangwei snuffles noisily, which also doesn’t sound like Mozart. Shortly after midnight, he turns on the light and we both go hunting insects. We get a couple but by no means all of them. Touchingly, he apologizes for the inconvenience, though he can’t help it. The next day I feel old, darned old.
• • • • • •
YANGWEI IS ALREADY in his work clothes: black jacket, crumpled white shirt and black patent-leather shoes. He shoulders an Adidas backpack with a thermos in one of the side pockets. When he walks, the dangling label from a tea bag looks like a little fluttering butterfly. I go downstairs with him and let him out. Men are surging out of other doors in identical black-and-white outfits, and women in pantsuits head west towards the dealerships with the shiny new cars. One of the crowd turns suddenly and runs towards to me. “I’ve forgotten my belt!” a stressed-out Yangwei announces, and runs back upstairs.
Then there is peace. I lie down on the bed again and doze a bit.
Afterwards, I commit myself once again to some digital self-optimization. This time I try out the extremely popular Chinese app MyIdol. Again I take a selfie. “Scanning face” appears on the screen, and a green line moves up and down my photo. The next steps are “Analyzing face,” “Calculating 3-D structure” and “Computing texture.” Ready. The program now has a 3-D animated model of my head. Automatically, my head is given a body in a black suit and a white shirt, the look resembling the armada of auto dealers outside. This is the starting point, and from here, I can do the optimizing.
There are countless options to beautify yourself: clothing, makeup, hats, shoes. I can embed my head in a huge hoodie with a print of a panda on it, dress like an emperor or give myself the body of a ballerina. In the end, I decide on a cap with a hamster on it and a red brocade blazer.
Now, I can let my clone appear in a ready-made animation film, get him to sing “Happy Birthday” in Chinese or make him a kung fu warrior, a pianist or a pole dancer. People who know the interactive website ElfYourself will have a rough idea of the possibilities, but MyIdol is light-years ahead technically. If more people outside of China knew of this free app, it would have millions of users. The provider is a company called Huanshi Ltd., about which there doesn’t seem to be much precise information anywhere, except that they have three similar apps in their portfolio. I don’t know who they are, but they have my face. I decide to think nothing bad of it and continue experimenting with funny hats and shoes. It’s simply too much fun.
From: Qing Policewoman
Who is your host? Have you got a couch or a bed?
To: Qing Policewoman
Bed
To: Qing Policewoman
And no cats this time
From: Qing Policewoman
Good. I hope no one climbs onto you tonight
Back in the real world, the center of Hecun consists of one main street with restaurants and businesses: a China Mobile shop, a KTV karaoke bar and a bubble tea shop. Men wear their T-shirts high so that they sit comfortably on their rounded bellies, and they spit on the street—“kchouchchch,” the sound of old China; the only things louder are the cars and trucks, whose horns, if you stand too close, cause tinnitus immediately. In some of the windows there are little Santa Claus figures and “Merry Christmas” banners. It is the beginning of April, but why remove them if they look nice? The Chinese New Year decorations are also usually left hanging for twelve months. I notice a surplus of barbershops, with a haircut costing fifteen yuan, less than three U.S. dollars.
A few streets farther on I come across a river that does a number of things, but flowing isn’t one of them. It is a dark gray mass in which plastic bags and unwanted food packaging are floating and wrecks of old wooden boats are rotting. The air smells like burning coal, scratching the throat and irritating the eyes; there is too much industry in the surroundings. A healthy economy is more important to China than a healthy people; the state propaganda speaks of a necessary evil that simply comes with progress. Nevertheless, as the leaders realized that just carrying on would make a part of the country uninhabitable in a few decades, environmental technologies managed to be included in the next five-year plan. Today, there is no other country with as many solar plants and electric cars.
I leave the center of town and head towards the highway, approaching the automotive companies. I discover shops for brands that I have never seen in Europe, their logos looking to me more like the emblems of an extraterrestrial fleet from some computer game: Cowin, Bisu, Sinotruk, Great Wall, FAW, Trumpchi.
Then I cross the highway using the pedestrian underpass leading to a huge site with international models.
When the first Volkswagen Santana left the production line of a factory in Shanghai in April 1983, cars were still mainly reserved for functionaries and cab drivers. Ordinary people rode bikes or motorbikes, or took the bus. If someone had said then that China would soon be the greatest sales market for cars in the world, people would have thought they were crazy. The unsophisticated Santana, a plain middle-class sedan with a notchback, was a flop in Europe but became a best seller in China, even though the horn was far too quiet for Far Eastern demands and the lack of comfort in the rear seat was criticized—driver and passenger seats were less important in China, as the owners usually sat in the back.
The VW managers showed foresight by backing early what was later to be a lucrative market. Still, mostly different models are successful here than in Europe, the model names sounding like a Brazilian Carnival song: “Lavida! Lamando! Santana Jetta Bora!”
The factory here in Foshan has just expanded. VW is banking on the future of electric cars and SUVs, and they will soon be producing 600,000 instead of 300,000 cars per year. It is still less than the plant in Wolfsburg in Germany, but Foshan’s is only one of nineteen VW factories in China. Nineteen car factories. The scale reflects how important this market has become.
And the Chinese adore successful companies. For instance, Yangwei’s parents—it was their idea that their son sign on in Hecun, Yangwei tells me later over an after-work lemon tea on the main street.
“They couldn’t care less whether I’m happy in my job. They only look at the money,” he says. If things work out, he could be earning 10,000 yuan (almost US$1,500) a month thanks to sales bonuses. “Maybe in ten years’ time I will thank them, but at the moment, they’re just putting me under pressure,” he grumbles.
Yangwei admits to having no idea about cars. He learned website design, he speaks good English and he has traveled to seven foreign countries and throughout half of China. But if he had to explain the difference between a station wagon and a coupé, he would have to pass. “On my second day, a customer asked me about the technical details of a car. I could only say, ‘Sorry, sorry’ and quickly grab a colleague.”
In the first two months he is expected to mostly look over other people’s shoulders and learn everything there is to know about cars, as well as the Rules for Sales Staff, a list of forty points that he has printed out and keeps in his pocket.
“‘You need clean clothes and must always smile,’” he reads out to me. “Oh, man! This is so boring and stupid. I feel like a schoolkid.”
In the tea shop is a little TV set showing a sitcom where a young man is meeting his prospective father-in-law for the first time. For some reason, which was probably explained earlier, he is wearing a pink tutu and is visibly embarrassed.
Yangwei translates a few other rules for me: “‘Ask the customer his name and telephone number. After talking to him, you must contact him within twenty-four hours. Offer him a test drive and offer him soy vice.’”
“What?”
“You don’t know what soy vice is?”
“No.”
“S-E-R-V-I-C-E,” he spells out.
“Aha! Service!”
“No, it’s pronounced ‘soy vice.’ Wait, I’ll check in a translation program. Oh, you’re right. ‘Service.’ But here, this one’s also great: ‘Don’t let the phone ring more than three times; at the most, eight seconds. Say: “Hello, what do you need, how can I help you?” Listen to the customer.’”
A small man in a polo shirt places some pink flyers for a massage parlor called Xiang Jiang on our table. The text promises “new feelings, new experiences” and, as a special offer, treatment for detoxifying the bladder. The need for toxins to be driven out of the body is a major topic in traditional Chinese medicine. The portraits of eight very young ladies, who, thanks to digital optimization, resemble bug-eyed extraterrestrials, suggest a kind of detoxification that cannot be found in medical textbooks. Offer service: the secret of a successful business.
“‘Talk to the customers about an interesting topic to create a good atmosphere,’” Yangwei continues reading. “That I can’t do; I’m much too shy. What am I supposed to talk about? Something like this here?”
He points to the flyer. On the back are printouts of a couple of discount coupons. “I could say, ‘If you buy one of my cars, you will get a free emperor massage.’ It’s all such utter nonsense.”
But he does see parallels between the two businesses—a colleague recently told him that the most important thing for a salesman is to look good. “Then you can sell them anything. Westerners have it much easier; they are attractive by nature.”
“If that were true, then the customers would also be attractive, and then the salesman wouldn’t be anything special.”
“Also true. But in China, both are ugly. That’s why it’s difficult to communicate with customers. Both are thinking: Why are you so ugly? Why are you talking to me?”
“Oh, so that’s why Chinese tourists completely buy out European luxury stores! Because of the beautiful sales staff.”
“No, in that particular case the people don’t care at all. The prices are much lower there.”
The beautiful foreigner. One of the most striking impressions of a trip to China for many is a previously unknown feeling of attractiveness. Westerners are often complimented, by men and women equally. It is typical to hear a “Your Chinese is very good” when you splutter out a falsely accented ni hao, or praise for your chopstick skills when only one in three attempts actually reaches your mouth.
However, there is a real admiration hiding somewhere behind the flattery—the prevailing beauty ideal is “Western.” The cosmetics industry and plastic surgery business profit considerably from promising white skin, narrow cheeks and big eyes.
Even the language reflects a certain admiration. In Mandarin, Americans, for instance, are called meiguoren, which translates to “beautiful people” (accordingly, the English are heroic people, Germans virtuous people and French law-abiding people.)
Because of their comparatively larger size, the average European woman in China feels like Helga the Viking, whereas foreign men suddenly find themselves two notches up on the attractiveness scale. In an astonishingly explicit article in the Chinese state newspaper the Global Times, a frustrated foreign woman complained about her sexual marginalization—her independence and strong opinions frightened off Chinese men. Other male foreigners were out of the question because once they gained a taste for “the amount of attention [they] get from Chinese women, with their slender and supple bodies and their compliance in bed, Caucasian women can no longer keep up.”
Before 50 percent of readers start downloading visa applications, a short warning about the downside. Womanizers don’t have a particularly good reputation, and the term LBH, or Loser Back Home, has become well established here, referring to the cliché laowai who back home just can’t get his act together, in terms of both his job and his love life, but in China manages to get a spectacularly well-paid job as an English teacher and begins living the life of a rock star. A hip-hop song called “Stupid Foreigners” by Fat Shady from Chengdu shows little sympathy: “You’re a loser in your own country—and come to China to be taken seriously” are two of the more innocent lines. The rest contains several repetitions of “fuck you,” “clean my car” and “I’m gonna shoot you.”
Back in Hamburg, Yang told me that they’ll take on English teachers everywhere. This is not quite true anymore in the megacities, where they usually hire only native speakers with certificates. And, of course, there are excellent foreign teachers. But every now and then you come across a cheerful Colombian, Russian or Ukrainian who simply says they’re from the U.S. or Canada and, despite a heavy accent and a limited vocabulary, they are allowed to teach in schools. The demand is simply too great; even elementary students are driven to private English schools on the weekends by their middle-class helicopter parents.
I write to a host in Yangshuo, a city near Guilin famous for its cormorants-in-front-of-karst-cliffs photos. The man is head of a language institute for adults and has an unusual offer: visitors get free room and board if they take on two hours of one-on-one conversation practice per day. Sounds like it’s time for the English teacher rock star life, so I agree.
The Best Chinglish Phrases
1Be careful clothes sandwich (warning on an escalator)
2Millet pepper love on small cock (on a menu in Shenzhen)
3No professional doors (warning in an elevator)
4The SS dental ministry of denture (at a dentist’s office in Kashgar)
5Alive steel rail don’t climb over (warning on a mountain railway track in Zhangjiajie)
YANGSHUO
Population: 300,000
Province: Guangxi
WILD WEST STREET
I SAY GOOD-BYE TO Yangwei and take the bus on the highway to the airport-sized high-speed train station of Guangzhou. It consists of some 79,000 tons of steel and 530,000 tons of concrete, which is enough for twenty-eight platforms and a massive waiting hall.
After going through passport control and the luggage scanner, I wander around in the huge pillar-free waiting area. Passengers are only allowed on the platform shortly before departure. The design of the nose of these bullet trains, type CRH2, looks like a cross between Snoopy and a white dragon. The train starts a little before the announced departure time. Chinese high-speed trains always leave between fifteen and forty-five seconds early. This might be a very German observation, but once you start watching out for it, you notice it again and again.
Frantically, passengers seek out their spots. On each side of the aisle are two seats, with blue covers and a white cloth draped over the headrest. My neighbor, a woman of about forty, is on the telephone nonstop. She doesn’t speak Mandarin but a local dialect and at a volume that is painful to the ears, though she’s not even swearing. I record some of her conversation on my cell phone so I can get it translated later. She screams her arrival time and what she plans to cook later, as if it were the only sure way that her conversation partner could understand her all those miles away. A staff member walks through our train car and dusts around the passengers’ feet.
China is railway country number one. Every minute, 10 million Chinese are on the tracks. Nowhere on the planet are there as many high-speed lines, and nowhere are there more plans for expansion. In the twenty-one years it took Germany to build a Munich–Berlin intercity rail link (400 miles), China laid 15,500 miles of high-speed track.
The onboard TV is also geared towards progress. They show the taikonauts in the Tiangong-2 space station 236 miles above the earth. China wants to send a probe to Mars soon and is planning a manned flight to the moon in 2024.
At least looking out the window the countryside is like a photo book from the seventies—tree-covered karst cliffs in the mist, uncountable numbers of them, like giant green camel humps that jut out of the landscape, a softer and more rounded counter-design to the angular high-rises a couple of miles away. Different epochs seem to clash when a train from the future hurtles through the lands of the past. A good two hours later, when I disembark in Yangshuo, the station is the most modern building far and wide, with nature all around white houses of four stories at the most.
The way to the bus stop is an ordeal, with men with cigarettes behind their ears shouting, “Taxi, mister! Where are you going?” “Hotel, hotel!” or “Taxi, hotel, lady!” I feel as if I’m at an auction. The brashest of them grabs me by the arm and with “No bus, no bus” tries to persuade me that the longish vehicle twenty yards away is just a hallucination. Luckily, I trust my senses more than his propaganda, and soon a clean bus takes me downtown for very little money.
The Zhouyue English College is another three miles outside the city. A chain-smoking motorbike cab driver, whose relationship to traffic regulations is improvisational, gets me there via the sidewalk, red lights, pedestrian crossings and, occasionally, in the midst of oncoming traffic.
The school director (“You will never be able to remember my Chinese name, so just call me Frank”) greets me in a kind of lobby, wearing a gray sweater, sneakers and black horn-rimmed glasses. On the wall are the teachers’ university certificates; almost half of them studied something to do with languages, but philosophy and business administration are also well represented.
“You have two individual lessons between 6:30 and 8:30 PM each day,” says Frank. “It’s simply about speaking a lot.” He makes a copy of my passport and visa for the authorities, then leads me to the living quarters on the other side of the road.
My room on the sixth floor with two wooden bunk beds reminds me of a hostel dormitory, but at the moment, I’m the sole guest. Next to the room is a rooftop terrace with washing lines and a view of white village houses and green karst cliffs.
I have my first evening free, so I hire a bright red e-scooter and breeze silently to the center of Yangshuo. The scooter is a bit too small, so I constantly bang my knees. At night, I have to charge the battery for a couple of hours, as a full load is enough for around forty miles. Does anyone understand why in eco-conscious European cities so many scooters still run on gas?
