Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [52]
Later, I found myself in the hotel restaurant. A hard, sweeping rain had returned, keeping me in. Hotel English Lessons hadn’t yet reached the waitresses or indeed the menu, and I tried to convey that I’d like to have whatever they thought was good. “I leave it up to you. I am at your mercy.” Whereupon they returned with a bowl of tomato soup, which is very possibly the last thing I expected to eat in China. Meanwhile, I had written a postcard to my son.
Dear Lukas,
I miss you very much. I am in Nanjing. It is a very big city with lots of cars, buses, mopeds, and bicycles. It’s just like Busytown.
Love,
Daddy
9
One day, I found myself musing about China. This often happened, of course, because when in China there is much to ponder. But, possibly because the coffee in the Temperance Lounge at the Nanjing train station was strong enough to induce a cardiac event, I found myself having deep thoughts, which, inexplicably, occur only when I’m hypercaffeinated. Despite a jaunty hike to the summit of Tai Shan and excursions into the Chinese past, I felt like I still didn’t get China. Not even close. Say what you will about the U.S., but it’s easy to get. It’s loud and brash, and it stands up for liberty and commerce, and it wants the rest of the world to be like it. And very often this has been good, this zeal for liberty and commerce, and much of the world did indeed cheer for America (you can Google it), which is why when George Bush was elected and proceeded to completely fuck everything up, the rest of the world felt the outrage it did. In the international papers one reads mournful articles about America, this country of renditions and Gitmos and waterboarding, and how it is finished as an idea, an aspiration, and as we move deeper into the twenty-first century, new models and new ways of organizing society will supplant the American ideal, now battered and tarnished. Maybe even the Chinese Model, the papers declare. It is always expressed thus, the Chinese Model.
But what is this contemporary Chinese Model? It is usually, very simply, described as unfettered capitalism combined with authoritarian rule. Give us power, says regime X, and we will give you economic growth, opportunities to become rich, and stability, just like the Chinese Model. There is, of course, nothing uniquely Chinese about such an arrangement. Chile, under Augosto Pinochet, combined authoritarian rule with capitalism. So, too, did the city-state of Singapore. But this isn’t quite what China feels like. Singapore is settled in its ways. So, too, was Chile until, of course, it wasn’t. China, however, is anything but settled. When in Beijing, I had asked a Chinese engineer, a friend of Dan’s, what he thought China might be like in fifteen years. “I cannot say,” he said. “If fifteen years ago you had asked me what China might look like today, I never would have imagined that it would look like this. And so I cannot answer your question. Everything is changing so fast.”
Everything is changing so fast. That’s exactly what China feels like. Even I could pick up on that, and as this was my first trip to China, I didn’t even have a frame of reference to compare. All I had were the books I’d read, which, now that I was in China, all seemed hopelessly dated. But from what I could see, there is no Chinese Model. There is only movement, a wild, hurtling movement, like a speeding train barreling down the tracks, the brakes shredded, and somewhere down the line is the train station, but no one knows which station, exactly, is it that this train, barely in control, is hurtling toward.
Once,