Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [50]
This is a perilous form of parenting, of course. It is very possible that as the hard truth of the world begins to seep in through the barricaded doors, the kids will become bitter and twisted, distrustful of their parents, paranoid even, and eventually they’d start making furtive calls to AM talk radio stations.
“We’ve got a caller from California.”
“Hi, Rush. It’s me, Lukas…”
Nevertheless, we persist with our NeverNeverland, and if the boys end up in counseling, at least we will have provided them with a few years in which nothing bad happens. Ever.
Chinese parents, apparently, think differently. True, kids in China today are often regarded as spoiled, the pampered lone offspring of the One Child system. Of course, most of China is predominantly rural and poor, where a pampered child is simply a fed child. But for the little tykes of the newly evolving urban middle class, no sacrifice, no indulgence, is deemed too small. So perhaps they are spoiled. But if the hundreds of uniformed little kids visiting the Memorial Hall for Compatriots Killed in the Nanjing Massacre is indicative of anything, it is that children in China are certainly not sheltered.
I’d arrived in Nanjing during a spring storm, the kind of squall that tosses airplanes in bracing, sickening ways, leaving certain passengers profoundly grateful to be back on terra firma, even though it was pouring rain—sheets of it—the kind of nighttime maelstrom that makes it exceedingly difficult to see the bicycles on the road, which led to a groan-inducing collision with a cyclist, and though I bled from a gash in my fore-leg I didn’t care, because I was no longer on an airplane and that alone gave me cause for jubilation. Plus, Nanjing is surprisingly nice. There are, for instance, trees, lots of trees. It is a verdant city. And it is no wonder. Clearly, it could be extremely rainy in Nanjing.
The city lies on the Yangtze River, the river system that carves China into north and south. The north gets heating. The south does not. The south gets rain. The north gets the Gobi Desert. Sun Yat-sen, universally regarded as the father of modern China, made Nanjing the capital of the Republic of China in that difficult era between the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912 and the triumph of the Communists in 1949, thus restoring the privileged position of the city that had been lost when the Emperor Zhu Di moved his capital to Beijing. Temples and gates and walls from the Ming Dynasty still grace the city’s lush hills. But within those old walls there is a modern city, where taxis come with little flat-screen televisions, and the streets are all glimmering and neon-lit, and the buildings, too, come with enormous screens featuring gyrating girls, and it’s hard to believe that you’re not somewhere deep in the world of Blade Runner.
And yet the city does not seethe like Beijing. Bargaining, for instance, is just far easier in Nanjing. I’d slowly adjusted to the need for haggling in China. At first, I moseyed about like a walking ATM, a convenient place for vendors and cabdrivers to extract a brazen first price from a dim laowai not yet familiar with the need for bargaining for the special price, much less the Chinese price. It was only after I discovered that I was paying approximately four times what anybody else was for a bottle of dodgy water that I’d begun, tentatively at first, to dicker for the special price, and I lived in hope that one day I’d be able to negotiate down to the Chinese price, the holy grail for foreigners. I’d found a Web site that offered discounted rates on hotels, and while there was no way I was going to input credit-card details on a computer in a dingy Internet café in China, I would take note of the discounted price at my target destination and make that my bargaining ambition whenever I needed to haggle for a roof.
“Nihao,” I’d said at the front desk of my chosen hotel in Nanjing. I was pleased to notice a sign that read, Today’s Hotel English Lesson #86. “We have many amenities to satisfy all our guests.” “How much is a room?”