Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [16]
I reclaimed my bag and returned to the square, which was now, only an hour later, seething with crowds. There were more vendors selling The Little Red Book. I walked past legless peasants on carts. A man offered to sell me his charcoal portraits of Mao, Vladimir Putin, and George W. Bush. How to choose a favorite? In the distance, near the imposing walls of the Forbidden City, soldiers marched past the looming portrait of the former Chairman. I walked back to my hotel, noting the plethora of black Audis with tinted windows, the vehicle of choice for Communist Party officials. Chinese drivers yield to this car, and from what I’d observed, they yield for no other.
A strange place, I thought. Wandering around Tiananmen Square had felt like a walk into the rapidly receding past. Perhaps it was also the smell of burning coal that prevailed in Beijing, an odor I associate to this day with the Communism I remembered from my childhood visits to Czechoslovakia. I am half-Czech, and when Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, most of my family had thought it was an excellent time to leave the country. My grandfather, however, had remained, and my mother, who had legally emigrated when she married my Dutch father, often took my sister and me to visit during the gloomy years that followed as Czechoslovakia discovered that it wasn’t quite done with Marxist Leninism just yet. Tiananmen Square, with its red stars and Stalinist architecture, reminded me of those years, except that at no point in Czech history would people there have regarded a man such as Mao as anything other than a villainous despot. But perhaps the Czechs had had better information. Indeed, even today in China one can still be tossed in jail for “incitement to overthrow the government” simply by publishing articles about the Cultural Revolution that deviate from the official line, which holds that the excesses of the time demonstrate the perils of allowing the public to participate in politics. At least the government acknowledges that Mao was capable of excess. Nevertheless, that to this day there are people in China—the vast majority, in fact, who regard Mao Zedong with adoration, while his heirs commute to work in luxurious black sedans—suggested to me that this new China people were speaking of wasn’t quite here just yet.
And then, back at my hotel, I turned on the television.
Of all the things I never expected to see in China, Tweety Bird speaking in Mandarin was certainly one of them. I watched as once again Tweety Bird confounded a sputtering Sylvester the Cat. How odd, I thought, to hear a cartoon cat speaking Mandarin Chinese with a lisp. Then I turned the channel. It was a commercial for Stay Fit Health Powder, a powerful new cream that enlarges breasts. It showed a woman being mercilessly mocked by her big-breasted friends. She had tried breast-growth lotion after breast-growth lotion without results. Until she tried Stay Fit Health Powder. The advertisement tastefully demonstrated its enhancement power by showing anime-type breasts ballooning upon application of the cream. It finished with happy testimonials of other customers, who were shown carelessly reclining on the couch, reading a magazine, bending over to water the plants—and all this could be yours for 99 yuan.
Okay, I thought. In a single morning I had gone from Mao Zedong to Stay Fit Health Powder. Perhaps China isn’t so simple after all.
Fortunately, I had a friend in Beijing. And a friend is a very good thing to have in Beijing, a city of 17 million people, give or take a million, inhabiting a municipality