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
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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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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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The first overseas trip is downtown
December 30, 2017 Comments Off on The first overseas trip is downtown
If you want to understand the world, you have to go out in it.
I’m far from the most traveled person I know, and that’s partially because I have a travel impediment: Before I head off to a country, I like to study the language enough so that I can get hopelessly lost, desperately confused, and thoroughly muddled. This requires a pretty steady commitment of mediocre effort, usually over a period of years.
For over two years now I’ve been learning the Mandarin flavor of Chinese, and feel like I’m solid enough to ask for a Coke, to misunderstand most ordinary things, and to completely bungle anything remotely complex. In other words, time for a trip!
On this particular trip, in keeping with my decision to untether from the grid, I’m traveling without a computer or an iTrackingdevice, nothing but a notebook, a pen, a few changes of underwear, a couple of t-shirts, a hoodie, a ball cap, and a cheap Canon point-and-shoot. The reason I’m going to China is because I want to. This is the same puzzling reason I give to my online Chinese teachers when they ask, “Why are you studying Chinese?”
Aside from being flattered that they consider what issues forth from my mouth to be Chinese, I tell them the same thing: “Because I want to.”
“But surely there has to be a reason!” they insist.
“There is,” I say. “I just don’t know what it is.”
But no matter how much you want to go to China, before you do, you have to get a visa, which costs $140. This is a lot of money when you consider that I got my plane ticket for less than $600, and that my hotel in Kunming is $23 per night. In Los Angeles, the China consulate is located in Koreatown, go figure, and it’s easy to find because of all the Falun Gong protesters camped out in front. Visa turnaround time is four business days, and I got there on a very slow day.
I say it was a slow day because the room was less than half full, not because it wasn’t insane. If you have a country with more than a billion people, it is a fair bet that at least a thousand of them will be in Los Angeles on any given day wanting a visa or having some kind of immigration foul-up. There were more people and more racket, squalling babies, excited grannies, amped-up security guards, and frazzled consular officers than I have ever seen in one place before, and I’ve spent a whole lot of hours in immigration offices of one kind or another in a bunch of different countries. My ticket was No. 36 and they were only on No. 3, so I figured I was going to be there all day, but I figured wrong. Despite the pandemonium it was brutally and noisily efficient, like chainsaws.
I got called to my window after waiting less than fifteen minutes, sprinted actually, because there was a sign that said “If you do not come immediately when your number is called your number will be canceled and you will have to start over.” I was nervous when I got to the window and the clerk glanced at my paperwork, threw it all back at me under the bulletproof glass, and said “You need copy of passport. Down the hall!”
I grabbed my stuff and slunk down the hall to a room called “Visa Problems.”
“Great,” I thought. “I’m not even in China and I’ve already been labeled a problem.” Happily there was a copy machine in the middle of the teeming room so I made my copy and turned to walk out, but hadn’t taken three steps when a furious voice screamed “You! Twenty-five cents!”
The whole room, which was filled with stressed and angry visa applicants, and stressed and overworked consular employees, stopped and stared at the deadbeat who was too cheap to pay for a twenty-five cent copy. “I didn’t know it cost money,” I mumbled, noticing after I said it that there was a giant sign that said “TWENTY FIVE CENTS PER COPY.” The sign was literally three feet high. The clerk made a hateful face at my pathetic attempt to lie. I reached for my wallet and looked inside, shocked to see that the only bill I had was a $100.
The whole room stared in disgust as I handed the clerk the Ben Franklin. It’s the first time I’ve ever had to get change from a century note made for a quarter purchase. My face was the color of China’s national flag. Back in the main consular room the official took my paperwork, flung a receipt at me, and told me to come back in four days. “If you don’t come, no visa for you, ever,” he snapped.
I hurried to my car through the wall of raging Falun Gong protesters, sure that once I got to China it was going to be different. Quiet, peaceful, ordered, spiritual … yeah.
END
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Cycling in the South Bay 