Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [41]
“Listen, Cinderella,” I said, reaching for my wallet. “Let me help you find a room in another hotel.”
Cinderella batted her eyelashes. “No,” she sighed. “I will stay with friends. But I want to see you tomorrow. What is your cell phone number?”
“I don’t have a cell phone.”
“No cell phone? Everyone in China has a cell phone.”
This was true. Imagine tens of millions of people screaming into their handsets—Can you hear me now?—and you have an idea what urban China is like. It’s true. Wei is the standard greeting when answering a cell phone in China, and it does indeed mean Can you hear me? This alone struck me as a compelling argument for the return of the rotary phone.
“This is my cell phone number,” Cinderella said, writing it down. “And this is my e-mail address. Will you call me tomorrow? I will show you Qingdao.”
“Absolutely. Look forward to it. Good night. Thanks so much for your help,” I said as she left.
Then I bolted the door.
Now, what was that about? I wondered. I was very perplexed. Was Cinderella just a particularly helpful young woman? Or was she a seductress? I had no idea. Perhaps I was just a little dense. It wouldn’t be the first time. So mysterious, this country.
In any event, I did not call Cinderella. It was a curious choice for a name. I’d observed that many Chinese had assumed Western names. At first, I’d thought that this was just the Chinese solution to a sweeping epidemic of multiple-personality disorders. I imagined people waking up in the morning and, as they settled down with a cup of warm bean-curd milk and picked at their steamed buns, they’d decide who, exactly, they were going to be that day. Would they be Suyin, the factory worker in Lanzhou? Or was it time for Lola?
But, as always in China, things are not what they seem. It turns out that people in China choose Western names because there are so very few Chinese names. Like Western names, Chinese names are toponyms. They are essentially descriptive. The reason we have so many Smiths is that a long time ago blacksmiths were apparently irresistible, extremely hunky mates. And so, too, it is with Chinese names. But in China, of course, everything is magnified by the sheer number of Chinese. Li, Wang, and Zhang are the most common names. There are 88 million people in China named Zhang. There are more people called Chen in China than there are Canadians in Canada. Go to a typical school in China and ask to see Zhang Li and you will likely to be greeted by a half-dozen kids. It’s become so problematic that no one knows Hu’s Hu in China (Ha Ha Ha). And thus the Western names.
But the name Cinderella evoked aspirations I didn’t want to go near. And so I’d explore Qingdao on my own. I’d gone there because I lived in hope of one day seeing the sun in China, and if ever I was going to see the great orb in the sky, it seemed likely that I’d find it on the coast. Also, I’d read that Qingdao was where Communists went to play, and I wanted to see them play, these Communists. Furthermore, Qingdao was the home of Tsingtao beer, and this, too, seemed like a compelling reason to visit.
To my delight, I found all this and more in Qingdao, a city of some 7 million people that jutted outward on a peninsula surrounded by the Yellow Sea. The city can roughly be divided into two parts—the old town, a little Bavaria with pagodas, and the new town, a forest of white and pastel skyscrapers with a proliferation of real estate offices and nightclubs like the Boys and Girls Show Bar and Disco, and Club New York, where patrons enjoy personal bottles of Crowne Royal, the drink of choice for those wanting to make an impression in China. To my eyes, this new Qingdao seemed like a comfortable, prosperous playground with stores devoted to golf and fashion, interspersed with an endless array of karaoke clubs. It is a place where inquisitive cabdrivers thoughtfully ask whether you’d like to make love, Chinese girl, and in case you don’t understand, they’ll