Flat earth theory
January 11, 2018 Comments Off on Flat earth theory
My wife rides a road bike with flat pedals. It’s interesting to watch how people react to that. Rather, it’s interesting how reactions are so uniform.
“You need clipless pedals.”
“Why don’t you get some riding shoes?”
“You are losing so much power.”
“When are you going to ditch those flat pedals?”
“You’ll go so much faster with clip-in!”
And etc.
Most of the people who see fit to comment on her sad state of pedal affairs know that we are married and that I ride a bike a lot, so it’s kind of curious that they don’t run that through their filter, like this: “She’s got flat pedals, but she’s married to Seth so she probably knows about clip-in pedals, so there’s probably a reason …”
But no.
The reaction is uniform and knee-jerk: “Are you going to get clip-in pedals tomorrow? Or today?”
I wondered why people care which pedals she uses. The ostensible reason is that she will pedal more efficiently and therefore go faster. But that’s a bad explanation; the last thing that a new cyclist should do is go faster. New cyclists should go slower and learn to control the bike at lower speeds. Physics aren’t linear when you fall off your bike. Incremental increases of one or two mph result in much greater force when you fall off, and therefore greater injury. Telling beginners they need to go faster is like telling new drivers they need to go faster. Huh?
And from a psychological perspective, why would you want someone to go faster anyway? Doesn’t that mean they will beat you? You should want them on the worst equipment possible, in fact, eating nothing but peanut butter and ice cream five times a day.
The biggest reason people want you on clip-in pedals, I think, is because without clip-ins, you look like a Fred. This means two things: If you’re riding with me, and you’re a Fred, then I’m a Fred, too. Or it means that riding with you reminds me of when I was a Fred, and it’s a lot more comfortable to think I was born knowing how to drape myself coolly over a 100% carbon bike that is all carbon and made of pure carbon rather than to remember that, yeah, I used to not know anything, either, and I looked like it.
And of course in road cycling there’s the fashion element, where people instinctively shun those who are clearly unfashionable in an activity where the way you look is oh-so-important.
With regard to safety, everyone should start with flat pedals and most people should never leave them. On a road bike there are too many instances where taking your feet off the pedals will keep you from crashing. Anyone who thinks that you need clip-ins to climb well should have seen Josh Alverson or Stathis Sakellariadis shred the Donut Ride the times they rode it in sneakers.
And a bit of Internet reading confirms that the idea that clip-in pedals somehow yield huge improvements in pedaling power is not true. At best, the differences are negligible. Tellingly, the athlete in the power test confides that he still wants clip-ins because they help him when sprunting for peak power. Not sure that has any meaning at all for 99.999% of all people on bikes.
I’ve used both, but prefer clip-ins for a very particular reason.
And I’m not telling why. At least not today.
END
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Super Bowl I
January 10, 2018 Comments Off on Super Bowl I
The year was 1967. At a hastily chosen venue picked just three weeks before the game, the AFL-NFL World Championship Game became what was retroactively dubbed “Super Bowl I,” the greatest ridiculous event in the history of sports. With a name borrowed from the wildly popular Wham-O kids’ toy, the “Super Ball,” the Super Bowl’s journey to become America’s lasting contribution to obesity, alcoholism, and TV ad saturation came about in the most inauspicious of ways.
Unable to sell out the Los Angeles Coliseum, a mere 60,000 of the 90,000 seats were filled. Fifteen million televisions in LA County were blacked out due to broadcasting rules. Coaches wore blazers and short sleeve dress shirts. Thousands of spectators wore ties. A couple of nutballz whizzed around the stadium in hydrogen-peroxide jetpacks powered by Bell Labs, the next generation of personal transportation that wasn’t.
Globally famous entertainment was had by the marching bands from the University of Arizona and Grambling State University along with the release of 300 pigeons, one of whom crapped on Frank Gifford’s microphone. Parts of the massive electronic scoreboard came detached and plunged into the empty stands, avoiding what would have been certain death had anyone been there.
Yet for all its failures, this fitfully started work-in-progress became the behemoth it is today, a watchword for diabetics, couch potatoes, and gambling addicts the world over. In that first game, millions of viewers watched the heroics of legends like Starr, Gregg, and McGee as they launched that modest first Super Bowl into the airwaves, a perfectly thrown touchdown pass destined for the end zone of fame and eternal glory. From humble beginnings came greatness.
Much like that first Super Bowl, pitting archenemy NFL against the upstart AFL, this past Sunday marked the beginning of a sporting event so astounding that, despite its modest participation and relatively empty stands, promised to change forever the history of sport.
I’m speaking, of course, of the new date and time for the epic Telo training crit in Torrance. Historically held on Tuesday from 6:00 to 7:00 PM from mid-March through September, this past weekend saw the first ever Telo Sunday, run from noon to one. With technical and food support provided by ShiftMobile, a host of eager competitors showed up to contest this legendary race at a new date and time.
A hard fought battle with repeated attacks saw a breakaway with Marco “The Origin” Cubillos, Surfer Dan Cobley, Kevin “Roundhouse” Nix, and Brooks “Lotta” Hartt. After a series of attacks and counter-gasps, it was me, Surfer Dan, and Lotta. Coming into the final turn I surprised Surfer and Lotta with my hidden internal bicycle motor and was able to cross the line for my first ever Telo win, something that the history books will judge as vastly more important than anything that ever happened in Super Bowl I with the likes of Lombardi and Starr.
Unlike those heroes of Super Bowl I, who earned a measly $12,500 per person (and an even measlier $7,500 for each losing Kansas City Chief), male and female winners of Telo received a freshly baked loaf of the incomparable Mrs. WM’s home-baked bread. Marilyne Deckman donated her loaf to the hungry pack of wolves, who tore it apart and devoured it on the spot.
Telo is going off next Sunday as well. Do you want to be part of history, and perhaps even be the breadwinner? Be there!
END
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Meet the New Year (It’s the same as the Old Year)
January 9, 2018 Comments Off on Meet the New Year (It’s the same as the Old Year)
New Year’s Day in Kunming, 9:00 AM, and the downtown was dead. There wasn’t a lot left to see or do but head to Changshui Airport to catch my flight to Hangzhou, where I had a 7-hour layover.
After several days I finally realized what it was that made this city sometimes feel like a big prison camp. It was the gates, walls, fences, grates, barriers, and bars that were everywhere. The point of all this design was of course to continuously break people down into their most basic, controllable unit, that is, the individual. A billion-point-three people could do some damage if they ever decided that the mandate from heaven had passed from the Party to someone else.
The streets? Divided not by paint stripes but physical barriers in the middle of the road. Bike/scooter lanes? Walled off. Walkways in subway stations? Divided by aluminum separators. The sidewalks were completely barred off from apartments and living areas with gates, locks, fences, and walls. Every unit, instead of having an open balcony, was enclosed by iron grating exactly like in a prison.
Nothing plays into the hands of control on a person-by-person basis, however, like the data aggregator/tracking device, which is so completely a part of existence that hardly anyone ever looks up. The devices allow the public to be pacified not with threats or generic propaganda but with customized eye and brain candy that is plugged into the purchase-consumption machine. People can’t act en masse without commonality of thought, and it’s hard to say the Party is wrong when you look at their docile charges, channeled and caged, and compare them to ours, who have made a complete mess of the freedoms they once had.
People don’t crave freedom, they crave a painless and brainless way to fill the horrible, aching, empty, yawning chasm of free time. The Party doesn’t tell them they’re free, it fills their time by telling them to work hard so they can afford the things that prove, once you have them, that you are happy.
The American Crudocracy, however, screams that you’re free, or that you would be if it weren’t for all the poor, black, and foreign people who have stolen your freedom from you by kneeling at your football game. The rage and laziness and ignorance are crystallized in the kleptocracy at the top, which insists that you’ll get your freedom back if you just allow a little more, okay, a lot more, kleptocracy and rage. And please don’t bother to vote.
The Party does its job with a lot more honesty, a lot less rage and theft, and with an eye towards helping the many rather than only a privileged few. Like the steel barricades that carefully channel pedestrians, China allows a lot of motion, and even some dissent, as long as you don’t try to hop the barricade. The control is gentle but firm and unresting, like the video cameras that track your every step.
So rather than saying it’s a New Year, it would be closer to the mark to say that it’s a not especially Brave, not especially New World.
Of the many great things that happened since my departure on the evening of December 25, one of the greatest was being cut off from everyone I know. No person is an island, but seven days in China without a data aggregator/tracking device sure makes you feel like one. I saw an American woman walking by, talking with a friend, and it was all I could do to stop from grabbing her arm and striking up a conversation. Luckily I refrained; the only thing that would likely have been struck is me.
Pretty soon it was time for me to take my leave of Kunming and I knew I’d be back, especially since I now had a tour guidebook that included the city’s most interesting destinations not next to a freeway. It’s funny how quickly a city goes from being scarily foreign to morning-after familiar. On the way to the station I even saw my disgusted street vendor lady who had been so mad at me for overypaying at the other vendor for the worthless stamps.
“Hey!” she said as we made eye contact. “I have more stamps! Cheap!”
“Next time!” I promised; she laughing at what she thought was a lie, me laughing because I meant it.
The train to the airport was full, but I was the only identifiable non-Chinese aboard. In a short two-hour flight I was back in Hangzhou, contemplating the miseries of a 7-hour layover and a 14-hour flight departing just before midnight.
Almost seven full days of a technological detox had been incredible. I wondered what had happened back home. How was everyone? Was there still air in my tires?
These long spells of nothing to do had made me appreciate being alone and filling my time with writing, reading, struggling with Chinese, and thinking my own thoughts with no one to bounce them off, no one to share them with, rocks skipping across a pond that left no ripple. The rest of China and the world were hooked on one huge algorithm syringe, and when you take the blue pill it’s astonishing what you see.
Part of China’s drive to become the lone superpower is its new policy of “civilization,” or “wenming.” Wenming is the philosophical vehicle to promote behavior and values that have made China a peer, and ultimately the global master.
For example, spitting. China had a terrible national habit of spitting. Young, old, male, female, toothless, toothy, the Chinese loved a good spit, and they did not GAF where the loogie landed. Somewhere along the way the Party realized that you couldn’t be a cultured superpower, respected by, say, France, if your citizens were covering the Champs-Elysees with a thick layer of yellow spatter.
Of course a lot of the spitting came from the chain smoking and the horrible air pollution, both of which result in throat/lung/respiratory diseases, but no great nation has ever simultaneously been a public spitting nation.
Spitting was just one obstacle to global greatness, but the Party decided that if it were going to send millions of tourist-ambassadors to Paris, Berlin, New York, and Decatur, it would need to also provide some basic cotillion for its spitting, pushing, hollering charges.
Enter the “Traveler Wenming,” or “Civilized Traveler,” a nationally distributed handbook available for free at every airport, in Chinese only. Here is a short list of things that the Civilized Traveler needs to keep in mind when he sashays abroad:
- No spitting!
- Say “Please,” “Thanks,” “I’m sorry,” and “Excuse me.”
- No spitting!
- No grabbing sale items, no shoving to do No. 1 and No. 2, no blowing your nose in other people’s faces, no shoving in line, and NO SPITTING!
- Don’t throw down fruit peels, used tissues, or trash.
- Don’t smoke in the non-smoking section!
- Don’t take pictures where prohibited. Don’t take flash photos in people’s faces by surprise.
- Don’t spend all day in the public toilet!
- Flush.
- Respect old things and keep your hands to yourself.
- Stop yelling and hollering.
- Don’t eat and smoke in church, and no spitting there, either.
- Obey the tour conductor and flight attendant.
- Respect other nationalities and customs.
- Wear clothing!
- No drunkenness!
- Where it’s a custom, tip and don’t be a cheapskate.
The Civilized Traveler guide goes on to list a total of 30 civilized “wenming” behaviors to exhibit, and many more uncivilized behaviors to avoid, primary among them, of course, spitting.
But this list is only a quick reference. The guide goes into much greater detail and is 46 pages long, with exhaustive breakdowns of specific situations that require “wenming” behavior, for example on airplanes. The airplane section is broken down into:
- Waiting
- Boarding passes
- Boarding
- Airplane toilets (no spitting!)
- Airplane equipment
- Eating on the plane
- Carry-on baggage
As odd as it seems, these booklets are working, because I saw zero spitting, zero pushing and shoving, zero hollering, and probably not much sitting in the public toilet all day, although I didn’t time anyone. To the contrary, if anyone could benefit from a Wenming for Travelers it would be the classy American tourist whose comment in the Kunming Starbucks guest book was, “Maggie likes dick!”
Traveling American behaviors, like American foreign policy ones, are essentially irrelevant to China, though. Get over it, and then get used to it. The New Year is upon us with a vengeance.
END
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Meet the New Year
January 9, 2018 Comments Off on Meet the New Year
New Year’s Day in Kunming, 9:00 AM, and the downtown was dead. There wasn’t a lot left to see or do but head to Changshui Airport to catch my flight to Hangzhou, where I had a 7-hour layover.
After several days I finally realized what it was that made this city sometimes feel like a big prison camp. It was the gates, walls, fences, grates, barriers, and bars that were everywhere. The point of all this design was of course to continuously break people down into their most basic, controllable unit, that is, the individual. A billion-point-three people could do some damage if they ever decided that the mandate from heaven had passed from the Party to someone else.
The streets? Divided not by paint stripes but physical barriers in the middle of the road. Bike/scooter lanes? Walled off. Walkways in subway stations? Divided by aluminum separators. The sidewalks were completely barred off from apartments and living areas with gates, locks, fences, and walls. Every unit, instead of having an open balcony, was enclosed by iron grating exactly like in a prison.
Nothing plays into the hands of control on a person-by-person basis, however, like the data aggregator/tracking device, which is so completely a part of existence that hardly anyone ever looks up. The devices allow the public to be pacified not with threats or generic propaganda but with customized eye and brain candy that is plugged into the purchase-consumption machine. People can’t act en masse without commonality of thought, and it’s hard to say the Party is wrong when you look at their docile charges, channeled and caged, and compare them to ours, who have made a complete mess of the freedoms they once had.
People don’t crave freedom, they crave a painless and brainless way to fill the horrible, aching, empty, yawning chasm of free time. The Party doesn’t tell them they’re free, it fills their time by telling them to work hard so they can afford the things that prove, once you have them, that you are happy.
The American Crudocracy, however, screams that you’re free, or that you would be if it weren’t for all the poor, black, and foreign people who have stolen your freedom from you by kneeling at your football game. The rage and laziness and ignorance are crystallized in the kleptocracy at the top, which insists that you’ll get your freedom back if you just allow a little more, okay, a lot more, kleptocracy and rage. And please don’t bother to vote.
The Party does its job with a lot more honesty, a lot less rage and theft, and with an eye towards helping the many rather than only a privileged few. Like the steel barricades that carefully channel pedestrians, China allows a lot of motion, and even some dissent, as long as you don’t try to hop the barricade. The control is gentle but firm and unresting, like the video cameras that track your every step.
So rather than saying it’s a New Year, it would be closer to the mark to say that it’s a not especially Brave, not especially New World.
New Year, newly untethered
Of the many great things that happened since my departure on the evening of December 25, one of the greatest was being cut off from everyone I know. No person is an island, but seven days in China without a data aggregator/tracking device sure makes you feel like one. I saw an American woman walking by, talking with a friend, and it was all I could do to stop from grabbing her arm and striking up a conversation. Luckily I refrained; the only thing that would likely have been struck is me.
Pretty soon it was time for me to take my leave of Kunming, New Year or not, and I knew I’d be back, especially since I now had a tour guidebook that included the city’s most interesting destinations not next to a freeway. It’s funny how quickly a city goes from being scarily foreign to morning-after familiar. On the way to the station I even saw my disgusted street vendor lady who had been so mad at me for overypaying at the other vendor for the worthless stamps.
“Hey!” she said as we made eye contact. “I have more stamps! Cheap!”
“Next time!” I promised; she laughing at what she thought was a lie, me laughing because I meant it.
The train to the airport was full, but I was the only identifiable non-Chinese aboard. In a short two-hour flight I was back in Hangzhou, contemplating the miseries of a 7-hour layover and a 14-hour flight departing just before midnight.
Almost seven full days of a technological detox had been incredible. I wondered what had happened back home. How was everyone? Was there still air in my tires?
These long spells of nothing to do had made me appreciate being alone and filling my time with writing, reading, struggling with Chinese, and thinking my own thoughts with no one to bounce them off, no one to share them with, rocks skipping across a pond that left no ripple. The rest of China and the world were hooked on one huge algorithm syringe, and when you take the blue pill it’s astonishing what you see.
Wenming for fun and profit
Part of China’s drive to become the lone superpower is its new policy of “civilization,” or “wenming.” Wenming is the philosophical vehicle to promote behavior and values that have made China a peer, and ultimately the global master.
For example, spitting. China had a terrible national habit of spitting. Young, old, male, female, toothless, toothy, the Chinese loved a good spit, and they did not GAF where the loogie landed. Somewhere along the way the Party realized that you couldn’t be a cultured superpower, respected by, say, France, if your citizens were covering the Champs-Elysees with a thick layer of yellow spatter.
Of course a lot of the spitting came from the chain smoking and the horrible air pollution, both of which result in throat/lung/respiratory diseases, but no great nation has ever simultaneously been a public spitting nation.
Spitting was just one obstacle to global greatness, but the Party decided that if it were going to send millions of tourist-ambassadors to Paris, Berlin, New York, and Decatur, it would need to also provide some basic cotillion for its spitting, pushing, hollering charges. Wenming for the New Year was gonna need a major push.
Enter the “Traveler Wenming,” or “Civilized Traveler,” a nationally distributed handbook available for free at every airport, in Chinese only. Here is a short list of things that the Civilized Traveler needs to keep in mind when he sashays abroad:
- No spitting!
- Say “Please,” “Thanks,” “I’m sorry,” and “Excuse me.”
- No spitting!
- No grabbing sale items, no shoving to do No. 1 and No. 2, no blowing your nose in other people’s faces, no shoving in line, and NO SPITTING!
- Don’t throw down fruit peels, used tissues, or trash.
- Don’t smoke in the non-smoking section!
- Don’t take pictures where prohibited. Don’t take flash photos in people’s faces by surprise.
- Don’t spend all day in the public toilet!
- Flush.
- Respect old things and keep your hands to yourself.
- Stop yelling and hollering.
- Don’t eat and smoke in church, and no spitting there, either.
- Obey the tour conductor and flight attendant.
- Respect other nationalities and customs.
- Wear clothing!
- No drunkenness!
- Where it’s a custom, tip and don’t be a cheapskate.
The Civilized Traveler guide goes on to list a total of 30 civilized “wenming” behaviors to exhibit, and many more uncivilized behaviors to avoid, primary among them, of course, spitting.
But this list is only a quick reference. The guide goes into much greater detail and is 46 pages long, with exhaustive breakdowns of specific situations that require “wenming” behavior, for example on airplanes. The airplane section is broken down into:
- Waiting
- Boarding passes
- Boarding
- Airplane toilets (no spitting!)
- Airplane equipment
- Eating on the plane
- Carry-on baggage
As odd as it seems, these booklets are working, because I saw zero spitting, zero pushing and shoving, zero hollering, and probably not much sitting in the public toilet all day, although I didn’t time anyone. To the contrary, if anyone could benefit from a Wenming for Travelers it would be the classy American tourist whose comment in the Kunming Starbucks guest book was, “Maggie likes dick!”
Traveling American behaviors, like American foreign policy ones, are essentially irrelevant to China, though. Get over it, and then get used to it. The New Year is upon us with a vengeance.
END
For $2.99 per month you can subscribe to this blog and pay to support what you might otherwise take for free. Click here and select the “subscribe” link in the upper right-hand corner. Thank you!
About SouthBayCycling.com: This the all-things-cycling blog about cycling in the South Bay and cycling in Los Angeles, maintained and authored by me, Seth Davidson, Torrance-based bicycle lawyer, bike racer, and personal injury attorney.
Hotel dinner challenge redux
January 8, 2018 Comments Off on Hotel dinner challenge redux
It’s funny how when you write everything with pen and paper you entirely forget about using a keyboard. Nothing to plug in or turn on, no socket to search for, no concern over how much battery you have left. You just take out your notebook (those under age 40, “notebook” originally meant a paper pad for writing), and get to work. Takes up zero space and weighs nothing.
It was the last full day of my trip and it turned into another odyssey, this time to a truly horrible place called the Yunnan Wild Animals Park. Getting there involved a ride to the end of the subway line, and then a couple of miles walking along very busy streets, where I got to appreciate one basic design fact: China knows how to pour concrete,
I found the park, which was an animal abuse area masquerading as a zoo. It was all horrible, but the lone sad orangutan gazing out at us while people shrieked and pointed and banged on the glass was more than I could bear. I had never seen an orangutan before and didn’t realize how large they were and how utterly human. This one lay on his steel display bed, so sad that it made me want to cry, his giant black eyes occasionally blinking, and I wondered how many decades he had left inside that tiny little cell.
I had expected some kind of park where there were paths and wildlife, but instead it was indeed “some kind of park,” the hideous kind. I saw only a handful of wild birds the entire time I was in China, less than twenty, despite countless hours outdoors and travel to some pretty non-urban places. The fact is that most of China has no wildlife of any kind left, not even house sparrows. What can be eaten or caught, which is everything, had been.
I found the main road and walked another couple of miles but my feet hurt so badly from the pavement that I couldn’t walk fast enough to get warm. Walking slowly, cold, is its own special displeasure. Another bus stop, another series of complex ciphers, another freezing wait, another uncertain trip, but 32 cents and heating, so there was nothing to complain about. Since the value of one yuan is about sixteen cents, and since people in the markets and on the street will bargain and haggle over one yuan, it gave me pause that despite its incredible wealth, the poverty in China is so profound that sixteen cents is an amount of money worth working for.
The bus seemed headed for downtown, which was a joyous feeling, until we made a left heading out of the city, which was not. I got off and figured I was close enough to find a subway station, and the plethora of scooter cabbies meant I was never really close to being lost. At the bus stop where I alit a woman was making gyoza, so I ordered fifteen. She was surprised but shrugged. I was starting to learn that when people responded to my perfectly mangled Chinese with surprise, I was usually saying something insane, so pay attention. It was fortunate I did, because instead of reaching for the gyoza tray she lifted the steamed meat bun container, fifteen of which would have amply fed a hungry family of, well, fifteen.
“No, no,” I said, pointing to the gyoza.
“Ah, gyoza! Why didn’t you say so?”
I felt like saying, “Because I am a fucking idiot,” but it was so self-explanatory as to have been redundant.
Her husband steamed the gyoza as I shivered and shook on the plastic stool, but when they came it was well worth the hypothermia, which the gyoza banished. I smothered them in soy sauce and fiery hot peppers, took out the reused wooden chopsticks (“Disinfected!” a sign on the wall promised) and got to work. Yum. As I ate I watched the woman do the meticulous work of rolling each gyoza skin, carefully fill it, pinch it closed, and line it up on the tray. Each one took about two minutes and the cost of each gyoza, retail, was twenty cents each. At the end she had small gob of leftover dough, about the size of a pair of dice, and instead of chunking it she put it back in the dough sack and returned it to the refrigerator. And I remembered, sixteen cents.
I was still northeast of downtown and figured I’d walk until I got cold again. It took a few hours to get back to my hotel, during which time I began trying to keep note of all the different things being sold at the hundreds of tiny shops and stalls and on blankets spread out on the sidewalks.
They included vendors who sold only chickens, toys, shoes, vegetables of every kind, guitars, haircuts, scooter repair services, donuts, games, bread, bikes, gyoza, noodles, used books, posters, printing services, silkscreening, tailors, medicine, beauty products, real estate, cardboard recycling, chicken coops with live chickens sold separately, pineapple carving, noodle dough, rag cleaners, garbage pickers, plumbing supplies, supermarkets, convenience stores, Chinese medicine, medical equipment, hairdresser/barber supplies, bags of every size and material, lottery tickets, internet cafes, roast duck, hot pot cafes, smog masks, thermoses, slippers, slipper liners, pots and pans, toilets, jewelry, diabetic foods, smoothies, wieners, nuts, feng shui furniture, gourds, necklaces and bracelets made from beads, safes, educational software, tracking devices, miscellaneous home goods, Playboy brand menswear, eyeglasses, picture frames, batteries, community health centers, blood banks, cigarettes, surveillance equipment, security guard supplies and clothing, uniforms, electric scooters, urns, wedding services, inns, sake, oranges, flowers, and even an old mendicant lying on the pavement in his underpants, thrashing his leg stumps and rolling on his belly while playing a sad song from a boombox and begging for money.
But what I didn’t see were bookstores or magazines or newspapers. The only bookstore in the entire city that I’d seen, Xinhua, was owned by the Party’s biggest “news” organ, and reminded me of East Germany in the days of the DDR. Nothing is deadlier to a police state than books, so you have to vet them with great care, and predictably there was hardly anything in Xinhua worth reading, especially literature or history or biography, i.e. “things with a different version of the possible than that espoused by the state.”
This is the big tradeoff in China, truth for security, and although people didn’t seem very happy or enthused about the prospects of tomorrow, which promised the same brutal toil of today as they battled for profits in 16-cent increments, the knife fight in the mud of selling useless shit on the street or in a cramped rented space, China also felt incredibly safe. And healthcare was available everywhere at little cost. And hundreds of millions were experiencing a rapidly increasing standard of living which included, for some, 100% carbon that was made fully of all carbon, purely.
China has 1.3 billion people and is incredibly heterogeneous, and heterogeneous nations have the potential for massive unrest. Through surveillance, a total police presence, a consumer economy, a corporatist state, and a continually rising standard of living, it offers stability, safety, growth, and a meaningful chance to participate in the global economy, soon to dominate it.
Is that worse than a corporatist state that openly wars against its racial and ethnic minorities, that humiliates the poor, that reserves healthcare for the rich, and that provides primarily for the profits of the richest? If freedom is so important and such a distinct part of our “special” democracy, why do so few people exercise it even to vote? Why is our “freedom” expressed in moronic captivity to football and professional sports? Why is our freedom of speech mirrored by a fundamentally illiterate and innumerate society?
Most importantly, if you don’t like China’s approach, what steps will you take to make sure it doesn’t happen here?
The fact is that free people die young, whereas properly enslaved people live longer. The older I get, the more I appreciate the extra minutes and hours.
Back at Hotel Unhelpful Clerks I collapsed and it was just barely three o’clock on New Year’s Eve. I watched TV for four hours, enjoying the amazing personality cult of the Great Leader. It was done with none of the heavyhandedness of the DDR, DPRK, or USSR, but cult is cult. And to be fair, Xi Jin Ping is a much better, smarter, more thoughtful, more humane, and a better human being than Trump or anyone in the current U.S. congressional majority, and much of the minority.
China spends billions on education, feeds, clothes, and provides healthcare for its poor children, and is continually struggling with how to raise standards and not simultaneously wreck the earth’s environment completely. Best of all, since all TV is run by the state, there is zero screaming on the news, zero attack-dog politics, and no bad news of really any kind. The repeated messages are:
- Be happy.
- You’re lucky you’re Chinese.
- This is our century, our world.
The surfeit of happiness and good thoughts made me hungry, so I decided to brave the hotel restaurant one last time for dinner. They seated me at a lone table again, but this time in front of the cashier and manager’s business desk, facing the rear of his two computer monitors, and boxed in by a refrigerator.
I felt like the orangutan, as the table sat squarely in the entrance so every patron could analyze my menu choices and my facility with chopsticks prior to being escorted into the free range dining area, which was private.
We hashed out the menu thing and they brought a delicious lamb and vegetable dish. My waitress from the first night had ended her shift and was in street clothes, but nonetheless stayed around until I finished eating to make sure everything went okay, i.e. I didn’t leave hungry. Having conquered the mighty Hotel Dinner Challenge I deemed it time to take on the Hotel Coffee and Tea Lounge Challenge, so I removed downstairs to the cafe.
I had little faith in the barista despite the fancy espresso machine, and she was nowhere to be seen, and I had nothing to do, so I grabbed a tourism guide for Kunming and began thumbing through it.
Who knew?!?!?!?
Kunming and its environs are packed with countless amazing travel experiences, exactly zero of which involved miles of frozen tramping along freeway side paths, zero of which involve seven-hour bus trips, zero of which involve haircuts and tea swindles, and all of which look tailored to show you a great time. If only I had known that things like travel and tourism guides existed, hidden as they were in the hotel lobby that I had passed through every day, given away for free, and spread out on large glass tables!
The barista took my order and brought out a beautiful cappuccino with a milk heart in the middle. It was the best coffee I had had since leaving home, and was $1.66 cheaper than Xingbaka. As the coffee warmed me, I thought of home. I missed my friends. I missed my bicycle. I missed my family, and I really missed my wife. Time to call this a wrap. Time to go home.
END
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My tea button is bigger than yours, and it works
January 5, 2018 Comments Off on My tea button is bigger than yours, and it works
My alarm went off at 4:30 but I didn’t go off until six. After a quick shower in lukewarm water I scanned my map, which had blow-up sections of all the main cities in Yunan Province, including Pu’er. In tiny characters at the bottom was a list of bus stations and which destinations they served. One of them listed Pu’er, so my only task was to show the name of the bus station to the front desk and ask them how to get there.
When I approached the desk with my map they scurried but I nabbed one. He scowled at the name on the map and shrugged. “I don’t know that place.”
He took it to his co-worker, who was equally perplexed. “Go to the subway,” she said. Back to square one.
I left the hotel and decided to walk to the main train station, which was a mile or so beyond the nearest subway stop. I got there and saw nothing besides a local bus stop, so I decided to do what they had been saying all along, that is, go to the subway. I wondered what magical thing would happen when I appeared at the subway to direct me to the bus stop.
Halfway there I saw a giant green sign for a travel agency touting tours throughout Yunan, and paused before it, wondering whether it was time to seek professional help. A woman darted out from the crowd proffering a business card.
“Where would you like to go? I’m a licensed travel agent!”
“Pu’er.”
“Pu’er?”
“Pu’er.”
“When?”
“Today.”
“Today?
“Today.”
“Returning when?”
“Tonight.”
“Tonight?” She looked perplexed.
A man in a shabby black coat ran up, also holding a business card. “We can do that,” he said.
“We can?” asked the woman.
“Of course!”
“He’s is my colleague, Wang. He is excellent and will be a good friend to you.”
“How much?” I asked.
“180 yuan,” he said, about $28, which seemed steep but not unaffordable.
“Okay,” I agreed.
They both brightened like Christmas trees. “Follow me,” Wang said.
We began walking back to the train station, then turning down various side streets until we reached a small office filled with people holding massive suitcases, and everyone was in a huge hurry. The man brought me to a woman. “Here,” he said, like a fisherman delivering a giant tuna to his happy wife. “My hao pengyou.”
“When do we leave?” I asked.
“You want to go to Dali instead?” the fish wife asked.
“No. Pu’er.”
“Dali more famous. And pretty.”
“Pu’er.”
“Dali is much better. Pu’er is old country town.”
“What time do we come back from Pu’er?”
“What time do you want to come back?”
“Evening.”
She wrinkled her nose but didn’t miss a beat. “Okay.”
It didn’t seem very organized. “What time does the return bus leave?”
“You just call me and I’ll come pick you up.”
I could see several people smiling when she said that. Something was wrong. “No, thanks,” I said, and started walking.
My two hao pengyou sprinted after me. “Come back!” they howled as the tuna swam away. “You will love Pu’er! Great price!” I opened up my long stride. If they were going to follow far, they were gonna need some lungs. After a minute I dropped them, then headed back towards the subway.
At the entrance a bunch of motor scooter cabbies were standing around looking for fares. “Where you going, friend?”
I showed the cabbie the name of the bus stop on my map and told him I wanted to go to Pu’er. He whistled. “50 yuan.”
“Too much.”
“Bus stop too far.”
“15 yuan.
“No.”
“15 yuan.”
“No.”
“15 yuan.”
“I will take you to the bus stop where you can catch a bus to take you to the bus stop to catch the bus to Pu’Er. 15 yuan.”
“Okay.”
I climbed on the back of the scooter and we shot off into traffic. It occurred to me to be scared, but I decided to focus instead on not falling off. It worked.
He whipped into a sad parking lot with a handful of small, sad, dirty buses, and offloaded me. “That’s your bus, number C71, cheap!” And off he sped.
It was cheap, only 5 yuan, or 80 cents. I boarded and waited as the bus filled. We took off, and it became clear why the cabbie had wanted 50 yuan. We were taking a very, very long trip. After half an hour we reached the massive South Bus Terminal. I got off and went in. A bus was leaving for Pu’er at 10:30; my timing was perfect. You have to give your passport to buy a ticket for a bus that goes out of town, so the government knows who’s going where. The ticket cost about $28, which again seemed pricey for such a nearby destination.
I boarded and soon we left. My seatmates across the aisle were well provisioned for the trip with several bags of mini-tangerines, thermoses of booze, and a stack of bread cakes. They were enjoying themselves immensely before we had even left the parking lot.
The traffic was horrible and an hour flew by, then a second, though we had left Kunming completely and were flying down the expressway. I turned to the guy nearest me. “What time do we get into Pu’er?”
“5:30,” he said.
“5:30?”
“Yes. It’s a seven-hour trip.”
Now it all made sense, everyone laughing at the travel agency when I said I wanted to return that evening; the “high” fare; the extensive provisioning of my neighbors. It was also clear that I would be spending the night in Pu’er.
Pu’er sits at well over 10,000 feet, and the bus never went in a straight line for more than a couple of minutes. We plunged down huge mountain passes that descended for ten miles or more, and clawed our way out with the vintage diesel engine groaning and bucking up the grade every inch of the way. I wondered if the bus would break down, but then put aside my cynical superiority complex. This was China and it wasn’t this bus’s first rodeo. They knew what they were doing.
By the third hour I was famished and dehydrated, and my seatmate offered me a bread roll which looked delicious but which I could never have chewed with my dust-dry mouth. “Thanks but I’m too thirsty to eat,” I said.
He nodded and pulled out a giant bag of mini-tangerines. “Here.”
I began peeling and devouring them, and they were probably the tastiest things I’ve ever had. “Hunger is the best sauce,” as Sancho Panza was so fond of saying.
We struck up a kind of traveling friendship; he and his pal were going to Pu’er for a short vacation, and soon the whole bus knew that I had thought it was one hour’s drive from Kunming, generating much hilarity.
About an hour from Pu’er, the bus really did break down. We pulled into the village of Tong Guan and all got off the bus. The driver called the main office, and they advised him to “fix it.”
With a much put-upon look he opened the engine compartment, poked around, then took out his toolbox. Everyone stood around and watched, along with a great many villagers for whom this was capital entertainment of the finest sort. No one was shy about offering advice, either. One man seemed to have very decided opinions about the repair job, which he punctuated with spitting. Everyone smoked. No one got angry. Broken buses seemed like a part of the ticket purchase, and the driver’s filthy and well-worn wrenches alternately inspired confidence and despair.
After half an hour of very intense wrench work, the driver took off his greasy mechanic’s apron, took a photo of the repair job, and texted it back to HQ. They were not impressed, because he began cursing and kicking his tools. He finally went over to a small side storage compartment, unlocked it, and pulled out a fat coil of baling wire. Everyone had an opinion about this latest development and Mr. Very Opinionated began expectorating with such vehemence that I feared he might spit out his tongue.
The driver climbed halfway into the engine compartment, and fifteen minutes later he emerged black from head to toe with only a short snippet of what had originally been a fifteen-foot coil, at least. He ordered us all back on the bus and off we went, another hour of dreadful mountain road with death at every turn, bound to this earth by nothing more than a flimsy strand or two of cheap wire. There is a metaphor there somewhere, and if you find it, it’s yours.
The arrival in Pu’er was anticlimactic. We shuffled off the bus and as we alit my pengyou mentioned that if I were really in a hurry to get back to Kunming I could always fly. If I wanted to have a good time, a really good time, a really, really good time, I could spend the night and hang out with them. “There’s an airport here?” I asked.
“Yes. Tiny town but has an airport.”
“How tiny?’
“800,000.”
I kept forgetting that tiny in China and tiny in the USA meant different things. By now I knew that the best shot outside a bus terminal or subway station was just to stand around and I’d have a pengyou in no time.
Sure enough, a group of illegal cabbies began chattering about me until one came over. “Where to?”
“Airport. Is there a flight tonight to Kunming?”
“Oh, yes, many.”
“How much to the airport?”
“30 yuan.”
I was too tired to haggle. If he didn’t murder me en route I’d not worry about the four dollar cost. “Okay.”
Pu’er was bustling on a Friday evening. I saw young people everywhere and the town consisted of, it seemed, one endless main street. My illegal cabbie seemed nice and was loquacious and inquisitive, but his accent was an impenetrable firewall. I imagined his questions and supplied my own answers, which seemed to work.
In a few minutes we reached the airfield, which was smack in the middle of town. “You’ll have to get out here,” he said. “The airport police know me.”
I exited and walked into the airport and up to the one ticket counter. “Any flights to Kunming?”
“Yes. In one our. 900 yuan.”
I handed her my passport and credit card. She entered my info. “Sorry, flight is full.”
“Oh. That was quick. Do you have another?”
“Yes. 11:00 PM. 2000 yuan.”
“Wow. Okay. I’ll take it.”
She took my credit card. This was the first time I’d used it in China. “Sorry, Chinese credit cards only.”
“I don’t have enough cash.”
“WeChat?”
“No cell phone.”
My friends who had traveled in China had told me that without WeChat to pay, I’d be fucked. Now I was, as I contemplated another full day on the Baling Wire Special.
“Tomorrow’s early flight is cheap. Only 600 yuan.”
“I’ll take it. How early?”
“11:15.”
“Perfect.” I shelled out the bills.
“Come here tomorrow at 10:00 for your ticket.”
“I want my ticket now. I just paid you for it.”
“No ticket now. Come here tomorrow.”
“Can I pay then?”
“2,000 yuan. And maybe no seat like now.”
“Can I have a receipt?”
“No. We will remember you.”
I gave up and left. At least I’d get to see Pu’er. Then I realized I had no place to stay. I hailed a cabbie. “Where?”
“Nice hotel that takes American credit cards.”
He nodded and off we went. We pulled up at Jing Land Hotel and he opened my door. “15 yuan, please.” My illegal cabbie really had ripped me off a whole $2.15.
I entered Jing Land in fear, fear of credit card declination. Fear of sleeping on a park bench. Fear of arrest for vagrancy. “Do you have a room for tonight?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you take foreign credit cards?”
“Of course!”
I never bothered to ask the price. I did not fuggin’ care.
The Jing Land Hotel was a big step up from my $33/night crash pad in Kunming. At $42/night I got more space, a nicer bathroom, hotter water, and two free condoms placed thoughtfully next to the toothbrush. I decided to walk around for a couple of hours and called the front desk to ask if they had a map of Pu’er.
“Staff will bring to your room.”
Soon there was a knock at the door and a pretty housemaid was handing me a map. “20 yuan, please.”
I was about to pay, a bit surprised a the $3.33 price tag, almost three times more than the awesome maps I had bought in Kunming that were already falling apart. “This isn’t even new,” I said, looking at the ratty edges and tears forming along the creases.
“Yes, it is.” I stared hard at the holes and ragged edges, so she doubled down. “Brand new.”
“Here I am, 400 km away from a provincial capital which is itself thousands of miles from anywhere and I’m about to argue over two dollars and some holes in a perfectly serviceable but shitty little map,” I thought. It was half principle, half cheapness, half stubbornness, and half annoyance at spending the day on the Baling Wire Express. Then I thought about the park bench I wasn’t on, the vagrancy charge I wasn’t facing, and her pretty, smiling, lying face. At least if you’re going to lie, don’t do it by halves. “Okay,” I said, giving her the 20 yuan. China won again.
Outside, Friday night was going full blast, but the main street was nothing but retail shops. I figured the food was elsewhere but after an hour couldn’t find it, and the few restaurants I passed were shuttered. One place was open, down a side street, called “World of Steak.”
The bored staff were playing with their data aggregator/tracking devices, and hopped to attention when I came in. I pointed to the Steak in a Box on the menu pinned to the wall.
“Cola or juice?”
“Water, please.”
“It comes with cola or juice.”
“Can you make it come with water?”
“Cola is better.”
“I believe you. Can I have some terrible water instead?”
“Okay,” she gave in, giving Team USA its sole goal of the tournament.
What came out of the kitchen was amazing, and not just because it took half an hour and sounded like thirty people were taking apart an old car with hammers. It was amazing because there was nothing there. The girl brought out a large drink cup 3/4 full with a lid shoved far down into the cup and from which a cute, curlycue straw protruded.
Atop the lid was a tasteful arrangement of a celery stick, a carrot stick, seven french fries, and about ten tiny, tiny cubes of meat. Each french fry had a ketchup-and-mayo face drawn on it. The whole thing was about three bites of food. It tasted great, but my last meal had been almost fourteen hours prior. I figured I’d do the hour walk back to the hotel and go to bed hungry again, which most certainly would have happened had I not passed two old women hawking baked sweet potatoes. The potatoes were huge, hot, and all carb. I bought one and sat on the curb to enjoy my dinner. That night I slept like a log.
END
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Chairman Mao
January 4, 2018 Comments Off on Chairman Mao
I left the hotel at 5:30 and the streets were deserted except for a handful of cars and electric scooters. Whether you like it or not, China is our future, and our future is electric. The scooters were silent except for the sound of their tires, and it struck me that despite the darkness no one bothered to use their scooter headlights, perhaps to save battery run time. Nor are helmets required; it was strange seeing so many bare heads on motor bikes.
But of all the things that were strangest and most disturbing about China, none was even remotely as disquieting as the constant surveillance. The video cameras were everywhere, every sixty or seventy paces, and they were matched by a constant police presence. The public security apparatus was on every street corner or not far from it, and you quickly dispensed with any notion of privacy or unobserved activity of any kind. Although I was traveling phone-and-computer free, I could easily see how total the surveillance becomes once the state has the power to intercept all digital communications, which are your thoughts. I was glad that my paranoia was benign, accepting that the monitoring was constant, but not really caring other than to note how effectively the surveillance modified behavior and thought.
The Chinese goal of total thought and behavioral control, however, wasn’t simply for the purpose of maintaining political power, but to maintain political power through a consumer economy that was constantly raising the standard of living. The vibrancy and energy of China is not easily observable in art or culture, but is overwhelming in its manifestation of consumer activity and the development of financial structures that enhance and accelerate the growth of domestic spending.
Commerce, in other words, was everywhere, but art and those things requiring independence of political thought, especially dissent, were nowhere to be seen. This played hand in glove with the total ascendancy of data aggregator/tracking devices, which keep a billion-point-three people glued to screens that alternated between carefully tailored political messages, advertising, monitored peer-to-peer and peer-to-network communications, and music. And selfies.
Sound alien? Check the mirror …
At any given time in any given crowd, the great majority of people were bent over their data aggregator/tracking devices, oblivious.
Sound alien? Check the mirror …
As I made my way downtown, hungry, I passed a woman with a small cart on which she was energetically cooking up what looked like the most extraordinary breakfast burritos I had ever seen or smelled. I ordered one and she began frying an egg and mixing in all manner of ingredients over a flat pan that was heated by coals.
However good I expected it to taste, after going to bed hungry and stomping the streets for an hour to further stoke my raging appetite, it was a thousand times better. It was also filling, fresh, and hot, and set me back a total of $1.20. Before long I had a hankering for coffee, and could not resist my generation’s equivalent of McDonald’s, which is Starbucks, or “Xingbaka.” I swore, falsely it turned out, that this would be my sole stop there, and slunk in, embarrassed, for my tribute to American industrialized food. Nor was I surprised at the incredible price of $7.00 for a grande latte, for which I could have bought five street burritos.
And I have to admit that it tasted very, very good, enhanced no doubt by the deep loneliness that had set in after an entire two days of no contact with family, friends, or news from outside the Great Firewall.
On the way back to the hotel I felt pleased to be able to find my way around a pretty big city with nothing but a map written in Chinese, but I was dispirited at my difficulties in speaking. As it turned out, reading was much more useful anyway.
Along the river I passed an impromptu flea market where vendors, none of whom was under the age of about 70, had spread out the most useless of wares I had ever seen, and for which they had, incredibly, no end of customers. Old blankets, old belts, stained kiddie shoes, ancient underpants with frayed edges, rusted toenail clippers, plastic and glass jewelry of the lowest sort; it looked like a supplemental income program for the aged.
Finally something caught my eye, proving that there is one born every minute. An old woman was selling Chairman Mao pins and old banknotes and medallions. We began haggling. She wanted $1.40 for a couple of tiny pins barely worth a nickel, so I offered her eighty cents. She laughed and we haggled some more until I got them for a dollar. Then she tried to sell me a broken transistor radio. Remember those? I moved on.
Sort of wondering about why I had stopped to buy a memento of one of the all-time mass murderers, I passed another blanket with a similar layout. I made the fatal mistake of pausing for the briefest of seconds, and the old duffer was instantly pushing a collection of canceled Chairman Mao postage stamps into my hand. “Fifty dollars!” he said.
I thumbed through the plastic display case which couldn’t have been worth more than five dollars, probably closer to fifty cents. I offered him two dollars and he said he couldn’t take a penny less than twenty-five for such rarities, so we went back and forth until he put them down and offered me an equally useless collection of stamps bearing Sun Yat Sen. One thing about negotiating in China that you need to learn early and often is that you always lose. It takes time to know the value of useless crap, and to make it worse you know and they know that for you, five bucks is a cup of coffee–except at Starbucks. Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that they have a mercantile culture dating back five thousand years. Plus, there is national pride at beating Americans, and especially tourists, in any negotiation.
I finally caved per the script and shelled out the insane price of ten dollars. I took no comfort in the happiness he got out of the deal. Then I noticed that the Chairman Mao stickpin lady had been standing off to the side, scowling. She had followed me and monitored the entire transaction. As I left she sidled up beside me.
“He defrauded you. What a rip-off! A cheat! You were burgled in plain daylight!”
“Really?”
“He’s a notorious cheating old man, a criminal, a thief of the worst kind. I would have sold you those stamps for nine dollars.”
“Quite a bargain.”
“Right! That old man is known for cheating everyone. He even cheats his poor old aunt.”
“Aunt? My goodness! How old is she?”
“She’s a hundred and three, totally blind. He steals from her all the time. Look,” she said, reaching into her bag and pulling out the identical Mao stamp set that the old man had been hawking. “Nine dollars, only for you because you are my good friend.”
Whenever a Chinese person who you don’t know calls you a good friend, you are about to get fucked. The old man had said it about twenty times and here she was, another street thief, calling me a good friend for a dollar less.
“Good friend?” I asked.
She brightened. “Hao pengyou! Hao pengyou!”
“Hao pengyou price is $1.00. Not hao pengyou price is $9.00.”
“$1.00 not hao pengyou.”
“Hao pengyou price is one dollar. Not hao pengyou price is fifty cents.”
She thought about that for a second and saw the way the negotiation was going, and vanished. It was almost 8:30 AM and I had succeeded at my first full morning in China. I had gotten breakfast, walked for hours, had coffee, bought some crap, learned the city layout on foot, and most importantly for cultural understanding and global relations, had made at two hao pengyou.
About the time I reached the hotel I was feeling peckish again and happened to look down a narrow alley filled with carts, each cart the site of a major culinary operation. The tastiest appeared to be the spicy flat-noodles-in-a-paper-bucket guy, and I was struck again at how much skill and actual cooking went on for a buck twenty. He cooked my noodles on the spot and I wandered over to the curb to sit and slurp.
The eating was extraordinary and the noodles were brimming with flavor and brimstone. My eyes and nose discharged immediately but I couldn’t stop eating. I had thought the burrito lady was queen, but decided that the noodles-in-a-bucket guy was king.
Back at the Hotel Celerich I continued having difficulties with the staff, or rather they continued having difficulties with me. The essence of the problem was that they did not give a shit about anything, and my butchery of Chinese combined with their inability to speak English meant that all interactions were to be terminated as quickly as possible or, better yet, avoided at all costs. There was no talk of hao pengyou.
This time I wanted to know how to get to the city of Pu’er, which appeared to be an hour or so away, and is the most famous city in China for tea. You can’t go to tea shops in Kunming without seeing a display of the big round wheels of dried Pu’er tea for sale, wrapped in beautiful paper.
Asking the front desk dude about getting to Pu’er caused almost as much stress and confusion as when I had asked where I could find razor blades. After much back and forth with the other staffer, and repeated searches on his data aggregator/tracking device, he ended with a question.
“Pu’er?”
“Yes. Pu’er.”
“I don’t want to go to Dali. I want to go to Pu’er.”
“Dali is more famous.”
“I still want to go to Pu’er.”
“Today? When coming back?”
“One day trip.”
This caused another round of consternation and discussion, with no one really believing that I wanted to do a day trip to Pu’er. I knew I was fucked when the manager came over and kept glancing at me with incredulity every time they said “day trip to Pu’er.”
He straightened his jacket. “No train to Pu’er. You should visit Dali.”
“I don’t want to. What about a bus?”
More consternation. “Bus okay.”
“Which bus?”
“Bus stop at train station.”
“Which station?” It was like pulling teeth from an angry tiger.
“Go to subway.”
“Which one?”
“Bus.”
“Which bus?”
He shrugged. Everyone had done their best to give the visiting idiot exacting instructions and they now had better things to do, such as anything but this. I returned to my room, defeated at another negotiation but pleased at having been defeated using only Chinese.
It was also dawning on me that one of my difficulties wasn’t simply my obtuseness, although that did explain a lot. The other problem was that in Yunan Province they speak heavily accented Chinese at best, dialect at worst. Back in the hotel room where the television announcers spoke with a squeaky clean Beijing accent and everything had subtitles, I could understand a lot. Why didn’t the locals walk around with subtitles? It was as if I’d learned English from an Internet teacher in London and made my first trip abroad to Biloxi.
I got cleaned up and went out for my second sally of the morning, hoping to get my hair cut. I passed a decrepit hair salon with a bored hairdresser standing outside with her hands saucily on her hips, daring any passers-by to come in for a trim.
“Haircut?” I asked.
“Of course!”
“How much?”
“$2.50.”
“Deal.”
She sat me down and got work. We chatted and I mentioned wanting to visit Pu’er.
“Pu’er? You like tea?”
“I love tea.”
“Pu’er tea is the best. I have a friend who is from Pe’er. I will introduce you to my friend. My friend has a tea farm in Pu’er. Friends. Okay? I will make you hao pengyou. Come back in half an hour, okay?”
Despite the danger words of “hao pengyou,” I agreed. I didn’t have anything to do anyway, so why not get murdered? I left her excitedly talking to her pengyou on the phone. She had been speaking to me nonstop about the pengyou for about twenty minutes the second I mentioned Pu’er, and I understood basically none of it, only nodding and saying “Hao,” when it was obviously time for me to say something.
She spoke with a crazy thick accent and I was mildly concerned about the friend and what I had agreed to. I thought the friend was perhaps going to drive me to Pu’er and show me around, but wasn’t sure, and then I also wondered about the wisdom of taking off with a stranger who was so sure she had found a hao pengyou, i.e. a sucker. Still, the haircut would have been good for $50, and a Hollywood movie star cut for the $2.50 it actually cost. I wandered around for half an hour and came back.
Meizi was very happy to see me, and a cluster of young men were standing around her, although they turned out to be with the adjacent shop, a motorbike repair place.
“Watch my store!” she said, and they all grinned as she had obviously told them about the hao pengyou, and off we went.
I tried to keep track of the streets and turns as we walked farther and farther from the beaten path, which was hardly well beaten.
“There!” Meizi pointed. Her friend was on the other side of a busy street, raising a hand and smiling. I was relieved to see that the friend was a woman and not another cluster of motorcycle mechanics holding large tools. Maybe we would be driving to Pu’er after all.
“Are we going to Pu’er now?” I asked, but they were talking excitedly and paid no attention to me.
We kept going down side streets until we came to a gate. “This is Xiao Lin’s house,” Meizi said.
“Oh, well,” I thought. “I hope the kidnapping quarters are comfortable.”
We entered and as the heavy iron gate slammed behind me I saw we were in a garden. Against one of the enclosing walls was a small tea ceremony table with a large chair in the center and a carved wooden bench opposite.
Xiao Lin sat in the chair and motioned me onto the bench, facing her. Meizi sat off to my side. “Would you like to try the new tea or the old tea?”
I had no idea what was going on, other than that, at a minimum, tea was going to be drunk. “New?”
“Okay!” Xiao Lin said brightly, and reached into a large wooden crate, taking out a small bag of tea. She and Meizi spoke without pause and I understood nothing, not so much as a word. It occurred to me that they were speaking in dialect. It would take me pages and pages to describe how Xiao Lin prepared the tea, and the tools and accoutrements involved, but suffice it to say it was complex, and what was more unusual, the tea cups were only slightly larger than thimbles. This was a tasting. The teapot itself was quite small, and like the teacups was made of glass so you could see the color of the tea.
Xiao Lin poured my first cup, which was delicious, and then told me to smell the cup as soon as it was empty. The aroma was so sweet and complex, it filled my nose and ran through my palate like a gentle aromatic current. I mimicked Xiao Lin as she tested each sip, swishing and swashing the tea around in her mouth.
She continued to brew and pour and brew and pour until we had drunk I don’t know many cups. “Are you hungry?” Xiao Lin asked.
“Yes, a little.”
She called loudly and a servant appeared. After a minute the servant began bringing out dishes heaped with chicken, sausage, celerich, steamed rice, pickles, and fruit. The chicken was all on the bone and still had two huge black chicken legs with feet attached.
“Country food,” she said. “Healthy for you.” I passed on the claws.
With lunch done she smiled and said “Now let’s try the old tea.” She carefully removed a wheel of dried tea from its paper wrapper and showed me the date, 2004. “It is thirteen years old, very good.” She took out a small screwdriver and rather indelicately hacked off a corner and put it in the teapot.
Xiao Lin’s family has the only CERES certified organic tea farm in Yunan, and she had the servant bring out the certificate. The tea was ready and we drank it. It was indeed delicious, free of any bitterness at all, smooth and fresh and completely clean on the palate with no aftertaste, but I’m not sure I would have waited thirteen years for it.
Plus, no one seemed to be in a hurry to set off to Pu’er, so I kicked back and drank cup after thimbleful of rare tea, water gurgling in the pond, listening to the two women talk endlessly. One of the other side effects of untethering was paying less attention to time. When I checked my watch almost three hours had passed. I had drunk at least a hundred of the tiny thimblefuls, maybe more, and although I had lost count my bladder hadn’t. It stood up and roared.
“May I use the bathroom?” I asked. It was more of a desperate plea than a polite request.
I entered the large house only to see that it wasn’t so much a house as a business office. Along the far wall was a display case filled with round after round of paper-wrapped Pu’er tea wheels. I used the bathroom and when I came out the two women were standing in front of the display case.
“Would you like to buy some tea?” Xiao Lin asked.
“Sure,” I said, relieved to finally know the shot, and even more relieved that she hadn’t called me her hao pengyou.
“Which one would you like?” she asked, a trick question because nothing had a price tag.
“Which would you recommend?”
“You seemed to like the old tea?”
“Yes.”
“Then this one.”
“How much is it?”
“30,000 yuan.”
I did the arithmetic, $500. I had brought a total of $700 cash for the entire trip. “Uh, no.” The whole operation was way out of my league and I started backing for the door, afraid some kung-fu security guard would jump out and demand payment for all the rare tea I’d drunk.
“It’s okay. I have a cheap one for 15,000.”
“No,” I said, reaching for my wallet. I pulled out about sixty bucks and handed it to her. “Thank you for the lovely afternoon.”
Both women held up their hands in dismay. “We are friends! Hao pengyou! No money, please.”
At the utterance of the dreaded words, I placed the cash on the desk and turned to go. It had been an amazing afternoon but I was getting worried. Xiao Lin saw me set down the cash and ran off into another room, reappearing with a round of tea, and shoving it into my hand. “Because hao pengyou.” We were at a stalemate, so I took it, smiled, and left.
Back outside the compound I tried to retrace my steps. Somehow I found a main street, too, took out my map, got oriented, and headed back to the hotel as the sun set. I managed to slam a bowl of fiery noodles before staggering into my room. It had taken three hours to get back to Hotel Celerich. My back, legs, and feet ached. I fell immediately to sleep.
END
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I’ll not have the celerich, please
January 3, 2018 Comments Off on I’ll not have the celerich, please
I want to write down my misimpressions while they are still fresh and ridiculous, and before reflection can smooth them out into something reasonable or faintly true.
Kunming was my top travel choice because of its mild winter weather and not having much pollution “for China,” as they say. When I arrived the sky had been smudged over by smog and if I had had to come up with a metaphor for this place when I got off the plane, I would have said that China is a cough, because cough is what I did on and off for my first several hours of wandering around town, not a horrific, torrent-from-the-eyes-and-bloody-sputum cough, but rather a little something stuck in the back of my throat that refused to be hacked, swallowed, or spit away.
I had studied the map of the city before leaving California and committed the city to memory, but like lots of things that get committed, it’s not because they are in tip-top shape, and I promptly forgot everything the minute I arrived. Trouble started at the Dong Feng Square subway station when the exit machine refused to accept my ticket and wouldn’t let me out. I lummoxed from wicket to wicket without success, trying my ticket each time until a machine finally just ate the card but still wouldn’t let me out. It was symbolic. I had navigated the entirety of the trip, unplanned layovers and planned, figured out the trains, but was unable to get out of the damned station.
You know how minor annoyances at home become soul destroying panic attacks when you are ten thousand miles away and untethered to your iSecurityblanket? Yeah, that.
I went over to the ticket office and explained my problem, and the clerk smiled and gave me a new ticket. It was the first smile that had been directed at me, and one of only a handful I’d seen at all. Here’s something to remember, fuckers: The next time you see a foreigner having trouble, smile. They will remember you forever, and go home with tales about the friendly American who smiled at them and helped them out of some completely pedestrian jam.
Walking out of the station, where I was accosted by dozens of motor scooter cabbies, I realized that the dearth of smiles had a reason. China is one hard fucking place. The people look ground down, and the veneer of a first world nation that’s plastered everywhere is belied in the exhausted and harried faces of the people on the street. What’s to smile about when you just worked sixteen hours, ten days in a row?
Kunming itself is a small city of six million, and is charged with the energy of all those people hustling and busting their asses to survive. My plan had been to walk from the station to my hotel a couple of miles away, which began shakily as I stepped around a street beggar with no hands who was doing calligraphy with his stumps.
[Note to self: You think you got problems?]
But things deteriorated quickly and after three hours I was hopefully lost, wandering around on a memory filled with giant potholes, crevasses, and yawning chasms. Each time I asked directions I got either a different explanation or something that I couldn’t understand, or both, and the farther away I got from the center of town, the rougher and more worn things and people looked. They also had zero time for some dumb American mangling their language.
If you’ve ever been lost in Japan you know how kind and helpful people can be to strangers. If you’ve ever been lost in China you will know how you flat fucking do not matter, period. Time is money and you are an expense, and no one is impressed with your shitty attempts at Chinese, either.
At one point I was wandering through a park filled with deaf people signing, at another I was off on a side alley with tiny shops specializing in carved personal seals, then another street filled with shops that framed scrolls and then a cluster of governmental buildings. One corner had three vendors selling sweet potatoes baked on the lid of a steel barrel, and no matter where I went there were police stations everywhere. I would guess that there was a police station every five hundred yards, but don’t think they are there to act as your personal tour guide.
I learned this early on, when I asked a cop a simple question, “Excuse me, where is a nearby public toilet?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
Much worse than the pollution, which wasn’t too bad, and the indifference, which was restorative in the way of an ice bath, was the surveillance, which was nasty. You are watched and followed and traced every second in China, all the time. And although it oddly feels safe because there’s a cop every ten feet, it’s the fruition of what George Orwell prophesied so presciently in 1984. Big Bro is flat fuggin’ everywhere, and you’re the star of your own personal surveillance movie.
I will also say this, and experienced China travelers can feel free to correct me, but solo travel if you can’t read Chinese would be hell. Even if you can read it, it’s rough sledding until you get the lay of the land. In my case I gave up at finding my hotel after four hours of stumbling around, and hailed a cab. We drove forever and it cost less than three dollars.
My hotel, the Kunming Gui Hua Hotel, was a fair deal for $150/night, and the steal of a lifetime for its actual cost per night, which was $33. I got a spotless room, a huge bed with a mattress hard enough to smash ice cubes on, fresh linens, a spacious bathroom, and an efficient if not warm-and-fuzzy staff. Early January is the nadir of the travel season, and the weather is somewhere between warm and chilly.
One of the things most exciting to see were the thousands and thousands of rental bicycles. You needed a cell phone and e-pay account to rent one, but they cost about 80 cents every half hour and were ubiquitous. With the weather pleasantly cool, nothing would have been more comfortable than having a city bike to explore on. But untethered etc. etc.
I washed up and got ready to go to the hotel restaurant. If there were one area where I thought my expectations would be exceeded no how matter how high I set them, it was going to be dinner, and all I can say is that dinner ended up being a complete failure. The death spiral began in the elevator, where I was going down to the second floor along with the very nice lady who turned out to be my waitress. We started talking but I only understood about one of every four words, two of which were “restaurant” and “dinner.” She also said that my Chinese was very good, a vicious lie and what I would learn over the course of my trip was a predictor of terrible outcomes.
She escorted me into the dining area, which had about twenty 10-tops, and the only patron was I. She was so excited to have me there that rather than seat me she began quizzing me about what I wanted to eat, because when she had asked me if I wanted a menu, I told her I didn’t understand. Somehow I had forgotten what “caidan” meant. Actually, I didn’t “somehow” forget it, I was in a constant state of foreign language brain freeze, which is what happens when someone speaks to you in a foreign language and your whole brain turns into white noise and you stand there like a complete fucking idiot waiting for the picture to resolve into something you understand but it just stays white noise and you just stay standing there like a jellyfish.
So she thought we would have to play a game of 20 Questions, or in my case 200 Questions, in order to figure out what I wanted; I still didn’t get why she wouldn’t just bring me a menu. Finally I tried to say I liked everything, always a risk even at home, much less in a foreign land where they serve Fresh Fish Heads in Honey Hot Pot. Here again I made things worse because somehow she thought I wanted tofu.
“Okay!” she smiled. “You like tofu? Okay!”
“No, no!” I protested, imagining a six-course extravaganza of tofu, but this protest put us back to square one of her trying to figure out what to bring me. After more discussion we learned that Seth likes Sichuan cuisine and he likes really spicy food. She dashed off and I began to wait, wondering what I would get and wondering how much of my mouth, gums, teeth, tongue, lips, esophagus, and butthole were going to be incinerated in the process.
After a bit she appeared with an entirely harmless scoop of white rice and some chicken mixed with a vegetable not spinach and not celery that I’ll call “celerich.” She anxiously waited as I took the first bite. “Too spicy?” she asked.
“It’s fine,” I said, unable to detect any spice at all, zero, nix, null. It was however tasty and would have stacked up well against any Chinese restaurant I had ever been to back home, and since it was obviously a prelude to bigger and better and spicier things, I devoured it and waited. A full day of travel and walking makes you hungry.
A few minutes later she returned. “Are you still hungry?”
“Yes. Very.”
“Do you want more rice?”
“No, thanks,” I said, but didn’t know how to say I wanted a couple of more entrees.
She nodded as if she understood. “I’ll bring more.”
She next reappeared with a heaping plate of the celerich, and I grimly ate it, next time determined to ask for a menu, which is when I realized the word for menu was what she had been saying from the outset.
At about this time a large party of what sounded like four hundred arrived, but they were in the adjacent elegant Dragon Room and I remained alone in the Great Hall of Celerich as people laughed and hollered and had the party to end all parties, which obviously took all the time and attention of my waitress. Somewhere between the fiftieth and two thousandth silent repetition of “May I have please have a menu?” I fell asleep at the table, awaking half an hour later to boisterous cheers from the real dinner party and to the twin realizations that no one cared about me and that I would be going to bed fearfully hungry.
I headed for the door, where I was met by a phalanx of four wait staff asking if I were okay.
“I’m fine, just hungry. I want to pay.”
Telling your Chinese dinner host that you are fine but hungry is a cruel insult, like them telling me my Chinese was great when I couldn’t understand the word “menu.”
“We will give you every food you desire,” said one.
“Here is a menu!” said another.
“Chicken or beef?” said a third.
“I’m sorry but I waited half an hour, I’ve been traveling all day, I’m tired and need to lay down but not at the table.”
Just then the distressed manager ran up. “Don’t talk to them!” he said. “They can’t speak English!”
“But I was speaking to them in Chinese.”
“They don’t understand your Chinese, either. What is the problem?”
I could barely understand him, and it occurred to me that if my Chinese were even partially as horrible as his English, then everyone I’d spoken to since arriving had suffered greatly. I told him my story and he only understood “no waitress,” at which he became livid.
“What? No waitress? Where is she!” he commanded, just as she appeared, in great distress.
Now I felt terrible about the prison camp she would be sent to, but not bad enough to eat another platter of celerich, so I signed the check and left. Out like a one-eyed batter at 7:30, I was up like a jack-in-the-box at 4:00, ready for the day. But apparently I was the only one in Kunming so ready, because everything was deathly still outside, and as a peek out the window confirmed, even the good folks across the street at the Liver Disease Center which, judging from the vast quantities of hard liquor on sale everywhere and advertised ceaselessly on television, must have been doing a land office business.
END
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It’s crowded in here
January 1, 2018 Comments Off on It’s crowded in here
While planning my China trip everyone said, “It’s crowded there.”
“I know,” I said.
“Really crowded,” they said.
“I know,” I said.
“No, you don’t know,” they said. “However crowded you think it is, you’re not thinking enough.”
“Whatevs,” I said.
I was flying Sichuan Air, a carrier you might never have heard of, and that I hadn’t either, but for $595 I wasn’t looking for a famous name as much as I was looking for a couple of engines that didn’t stall over the Pacific, and maybe a set of working landing gear.
Our plane, an Airbus A230 that seats about 236 Chinese or perhaps 100 typical corn-fed Americans, was absolutely packed at the check-in counter. The line was so long it went all the way to Gardena, and everyone had six items more than the allotted amount, and each extra item weighed 50kg, and every customer wanted to have a long discussion with the counter person about why they couldn’t check everything for free, and by discussion I mean “any minute people were going to start throwing punches.”
Just because everyone had a ticket and an assigned seat didn’t mean that anyone was laying down arms at the gate, either, as the jostling, pushing, shoving, elbowing, toe-stamping, and dirty-looking started before we were even called to line up. There was an energy that felt like the Tokyo Yamanote Line at 7:00 AM in Shinjuku station times four hundred thousand billion million trillion, and the whole thing reminded me of the only Josef Stalin quote I ever heard that was worth remembering, which is “Quantity has a quality all its own.”
Once we took off everything worked perfectly. The engines didn’t stop, the toilets flushed, and the food arrived, a spicy chicken dish that was so hot it burned through the seat tray like the acid from the critter when they tried to cut it in Alien. Everyone on the plane was Chinese except for me and a lady who happened to be sitting next to me, and she was angry about everything.
“I hate traveling to China!” she said.
“Then why do you go?” I asked.
“I have to for work. Last time, our flight from Shanghai arrived late at Chongging at 10:45 and I tried to explain to aircraft personnel that I have a connecting flight, which no one understood as NO ONE could understand or talk English.”
“You were in China, right?”
She ignored me. “Luckily, a passenger could interpret for me. Can you believe it? Instead of announcing on the plane that everyone needs to sit down and only those affected need to disembark first, they didn’t announce anything.”
“Maybe they did, but it was in Chinese.”
“Do I look Chinese? They did have a shuttle bus to take us to the international terminal but we were informed our luggage wouldn’t be on the flight and would only arrive four days later. Four days! Can you believe it? Then when we got onto the connecting flight and there was a person sitting in my seat, and if you do not speak Chinese, well, no luck for you! And of course NO ONE from flight personnel could speak English. NO ONE.”
“Sounds like there’s a lot of Chinese is being spoken in China.”
“Nothing but! It’s ridiculous! And I was at the back of the plane so by the time the food gets to you there is no choice but the spicy chicken because all of the other choices have all been given out, not that you would be missing out as the food is terrible and the drinks are warm and if you’re sitting behind the bulkhead, which I was, be prepared to get your feet trampled or legs bashed as they everyone and their goat walks through. And don’t bother complaining because … ”
I interrupted her. “No one speaks English?”
“Exactly!!”
After about twelve hours we landed in Hangzhou, where I was supposed to change planes to go to Kunming. Just as my clever fellow passenger had predicted, everyone there seemed to speak Chinese, and frankly, if you can speak Chinese things are pretty easy to navigate, so I was in luck. I got on my connecting flight, which was a mere four hours long, and things were going swimmingly until we started to descend.
I listened to the announcement as hard as I could but all I got was “Changsha Airport,” which is halfway between Hangzhou and Kunming and wasn’t on the itinerary as far as I knew. No one seemed surprised when we landed and all got off the plane. I finally screwed myself up and asked a lady where we were.
“Changsha,” she said.
“But I thought we were going to Kunming.”
“We are.”
“Then why are we in Changsha?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe they need some gasoline?”
I thought about that and figured that if they did need gasoline, I’m glad they stopped, but if it was more of a cigarette break type thing, I might be pissed. After two hours we were told to get back on the plane, and as hard as I tried to listen, no one seemed to be complaining or to even be surprised.
We flew for a couple of more hours and then landed in Kunming. I got through security, then immigration, then security, then customs, then security, then security, and finally through security, after which I was standing in the main arrival lobby, red-eyed, jet-lagged, and overwhelmed. “China does indeed have a billion people,” I thought. “And all of them are right here.”
END
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Proper travel preparation through eating
December 31, 2017 Comments Off on Proper travel preparation through eating
Most people who live in LA know about Chinatown, which is downtown near Dodger Stadium. But that’s the old Chinatown.
The new area that has a very dense population of Chinese people is in the Alhambra area. As soon as you get there the businesses have signs in Chinese, there are numerous Chinese supermarkets, and of course countless restaurants. One place we like to go is Mama Lu’s Dumpling House.
It is always crowded and there is always a wait, but the food is cheap, tremendously good, and the portions are monstrous. There is always a smattering of non-Chinese customers, but the giant TVs on the wall all play Chinese movies or TV shows and the sound of Chinese predominates. Families are often there celebrating birthdays, the table spread with so much food it almost hurts to look at it.
The family wanted to have dinner there, so we went and stuffed ourselves. I figured that with my upcoming trip it made sense to eat as much Chinese food as I could. So I did.
One of the great things about leaving the #socmed grid is that I have become less and less tethered to the other parts of the digital grid as well. Although it’s hardly an adventure into uncharted territory, going off to Kunming for a week without a phone or laptop seems daring. That’s how much things have changed. I still remember arriving in Tokyo on January 15, 1987 and it didn’t seem daring at all to travel without a cell phone because they didn’t exist.
When you took a trip, part of the deal was that you were going to be incommunicado except for postcards and emergency phone calls if you had to make them–phone calls made from a phone booth. Remember those?
As the trip has gotten closer it has seemed more and more like an untethering, although in reality it is a pretty ordinary trip. Millions of people fly to Kunming every year. There is no unexplored part of China, and there hasn’t been for about 5,000 years or so, maybe a lot more.
Since I knew I’d be without a phone I spent some time memorizing the subway lines, which are very simple, and it reinforced how helpful it is to be able to read Chinese. For the last couple of years I’ve been slogging away at the language, the area I’ve thought was the least important but that I nonetheless kept hacking away at, reading, turns out to be, I think, the most important.
Unlike other recent trips, I’m also traveling without a bike. It’s amazing how little you need when you are traveling alone and without a sports toy. A few pairs of socks, underwear, t-shirts, tooth equipment and razors, pen and notepads, passport, cash, a couple of credit cards, and you’re good to go.
When I get there I’ll try to rent a bike. Rental bikes are ubiquitous but you have to use a phone and an account with Ali-Pay or WeChat, so it’s possible I’ll just be walking, riding the bus, and riding the train.
Have you ever wanted to do something all your life, and then when the time actually comes to do it, you get nervous, and are even a little bit unsure about whether you really want to do it? That’s kind of how I feel. I took Chinese in college and even had a job offer from the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, but other things intervened. After traveling to Japan, China always seemed like the next logical and exciting and interesting step.
But I never took it.
Now I’m on the cusp of getting on the plane and am nervous, not so much about the trip but about whether it will live up to my expectations, which is weird because I don’t have any. My only travel plans so far are:
- Go shopping for razor blades for my razor.
- Get a haircut.
- Visit a few bookstores.
- Visit a few bike shops.
- Take a day trip to Puer and buy some tea.
The haircut might be the best part. We’ll see.
END
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Cycling in the South Bay 