Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [128]
And there were oranges, big, impossibly juicy, mouth-watering oranges. I had no idea where they might have grown. Chengdu, like every city in China, resided under a gray-brown haze of pollution. Indeed, surrounded by the high mountains of Sichuan, the pollution was particularly awful. But no matter. Someone somewhere in Sichuan Province had grown the most perfect oranges. And here they were.
Really, I was so happy I was nearly tittering. This is because not only was I in the possession of citrus, I also had in my hands a thick stack of magazines and newspapers—Time, Newsweek, The Economist, the International Herald Tribune, a full week’s worth of news from the outside world.
How can this be? you wonder. Surely, it’s not possible to buy unfiltered Western newsmagazines in a country so very, very touchy about a free press. This is true. You can’t. Not in Chengdu, in any case.
But you can steal them.
So steal them is precisely what I did. This was not a crime of opportunity even. This was planned. It had been weeks since I’d read a newspaper that wasn’t a broadsheet of propaganda. Deep inside the Middle Kingdom, one could even doubt the existence of a world beyond the walls of China. True, the Chinese press was very diligent in reporting on the Deputy Minister for the State Economic and Trade Commission’s successful meeting with counterparts in Tajikistan. And they did note that a Chinese firm had won a bid to build a road in Algeria. But this wasn’t the news I was yearning for. Out there, beyond China, celebrities were falling apart in glorious splendor, politicians were soliciting sex in airport men’s rooms, vice presidents were shooting people in the face, and the cost of housing in California was finally (finally!) coming down. Such were my informational concerns. And they had gone unmet in China.
And so I put on my cleanest clothes and did my best impersonation of someone who would pay $350 for a night at the Hilton, when you can get a very good room in a Chinese hotel for $35 (and it even comes with a brothel). “Good afternoon, sir,” said the doorman as he opened the door, and I was delighted to discover that they speak English at the Hilton. Tempted as I was to stop and inquire about his life story, I marched in, busy-like, as if I had meetings or possibly an important conference call, and walked up to the business center. There arrayed ever so delicately lay my prize. A sign warned me to not even think about taking these magazines and newspapers outside the business center. But that was precisely my plan. I waited patiently, idly flipping though the International Herald Tribune, which informed me that while I was in Tibet, the Chinese army had shot two Tibetans on a mountain pass near the border with Nepal. Normally, of course, one wouldn’t hear about the Chinese Army shooting Tibetans. But the incident had been captured on videotape by German mountain climbers on the Nepalese side of the border, and soon the tape, like all tapes today, had made its way to YouTube.
And then, when the attendant left to help someone with a fax, I rose from my plush chair and grabbed the newspapers and magazines. Not just one or two, but all of them. I stuffed them inside my backpack and fled.
So, as you can imagine, I was absolutely overflowing with glee. I found a backpackers’ café on the Brocade River, ordered a Tsingtao, and flipped open my newspaper. Really, I couldn’t have been more pleased with my world at that moment. It had been so very, very long since I’d beheld a newspaper beyond the peppy offerings of China Daily. It’s astonishing, really, that in a country with 34 million bloggers and another 123 million Internet users, a number growing by leaps and bounds each day, that the government maintains such a tight grip on information. The media continues to serve the interest of the state, but online anything goes. True, there were thousands of Internet police officers lurking and trolling the Web. But they can only react once something has been posted. Meanwhile, information