Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [18]
At night, once I could safely stay up past 8 P.M. without nodding off into a jet-lag-induced, drool-producing slumber, Dan introduced me to the trippy mayhem that is Beijing night-life. It was breathtaking. Of course, as a parent of two kids under the age of five living in Sacramento, it didn’t take much to impress me. Indeed, I couldn’t recall the last time I had been inside anything fancying itself a club, though I’m fairly certain it must have been back when INXS was king. Twenty years ago, Beijing had been about as sexless a city as humanity is capable of creating, and now here I was, somewhere in the slinky depths of Club Banana, listening to a throbbing techno-funk-house-electronica-groove. Dan, helpful as always, translated as the stunningly beautiful young woman who stood before me inquired whether I’d like to dance with her, and just as I was beginning to feel particularly good-looking, I was informed that the privilege would cost me 300 yuan.
Now and then at night, I’d feel as if I were anywhere—London, Tokyo, New York, feeling as groovy in a nightclub in Beijing as I did in a lounge in London. The China of the Mao era seemed far removed. In the darkness of night, beneath the glimmering neon, this Beijing, with its thumping nightclubs and plethora of elegant restaurants, felt familiar—provided, of course, one ignored the loogies landing at your feet. But, of course, things in China are not always as they seem. One evening, while I was enjoying a delectable duck cooked in the Peking manner at a restaurant in the Embassy District, I asked the Australian businessman who had joined Dan and me for dinner what it was like to do business here.
“China is a dictatorship, and if you cross the government, or someone connected to it, then your life is literally in danger. It’s all done very quietly. So you don’t cross the government.”
“Really?”
“Doing business in China is like doing business with the mafia,” he added. “You have to be careful. And you don’t cross the wrong person.”
And then the conversation turned to factory workers on roller skates.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Did you just say factory workers on roller skates?”
“Yes,” said the businessman. “They work faster on roller skates. It’s more efficient.”
“But don’t people get hurt?”
“Welcome to China,” he said. “It’s different here.”
Interesting as this was, I had hopes of actually talking to a Chinese person about the changes in Beijing. And so one afternoon I asked Dan if he could help me find a translator, someone to wander around with as I explored the tumultuous capital.
“Sure,” he said. “We can do that right now if you want.”
Puzzled, I followed him inside the Oriental Plaza, a luxurious shopping arcade near Tiananmen Square. The Oriental Plaza is an emporium for the wealthy and the nearly wealthy, a glittering mall full of high-end Chinese boutiques, as well as more familiar stores such as Coach and Burberry. There was even a store selling what it claimed was the BMW Lifestyle, and on the lowest level, tucked into a corner, was the Coca-Cola shop, which seemed like a vestige of the eighties, when the Communist world got its first taste of the West.
“This wasn’t exactly what I was expecting to see in China,” I noted as we walked past the Hugo Boss store. “I feel poor here. I shouldn’t feel poor in China, should I?”
“There are about 300 million people in China who could be called middle class or even wealthy. But if you’d really like to feel poor, I’ll take you to the Ferrari dealership.”
“The Ferrari dealership?