Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [64]
“Yes,” I said.
“Where have you been?”
I told him.
“You have not seen much yet. China is a big country.”
This was manifestly true.
“Where are you going now?”
“To Hangzhou,” I said.
“You must walk around West Lake. It is very beautiful.”
“I will. May I say that your English is excellent?”
“I studied English as a boy, and I always remembered it. Later, I had to study Russian, but I’ve already forgotten most of it. I was a professor of chemistry in Shanghai.”
“Ah,” I said, trying very hard to think of a question or observation that pertained to chemistry, but before I could ask him to explain the mysteries of the periodic table, he asked me what I did.
“I do some writing,” I said.
“And will you be writing about China?”
“Maybe. It’s a very complicated country.”
“You need to live here if you want to understand China.”
Yes, well, I would, I thought, if I could find someplace in China that didn’t feel like a biohazard zone. Until I found such a place, I was beginning to realize, I couldn’t in good conscience bring two little kids to live here. I could imagine them years later; I’m glad you had a chance to understand China, Daddy. Cough, cough. Don’t worry. It’s only the emphysema.
“I’m thinking about it,” I said noncommittally. It seemed impolite to suggest that I found the air in China so abysmally foul.
“Hmm.” He nodded. “You are an American?”
“I live there.”
“I think many Americans believe we still shave our foreheads and wear long ponytails.”
“Do you think so?”
“Yes. American movies portray the Chinese very unkindly, like Charlie Chang.”
“That’s true. But I think that’s changed.”
Surely he’d be proud to have his culture represented by Jackie Chan. And then I thought about it for a moment, and as I recalled the Chinese stereotypes in the latter Star Wars movies, and the evil agents on 24 and so on, I had to concede that he did have a point and that for Hollywood, when it comes to the Chinese, there is only Bruce Lee and Ming the Merciless.
I asked him if he’d traveled to the United States.
“I have been to Berkeley, Seattle, and Omaha,” he said.
And Omaha? An interesting choice for a travel itinerary in America. And a good one. I wondered where I could find the Chinese Omaha.
“My son works for Microsoft,” he added.
“Is that right?” I said. “You must be very proud of your son.” It’s a long, hard journey from the streets of Shanghai to the gilded campus in Redmond. “But I would think that today there are as many, if not more, opportunities in China as there are in the U.S.”
“Maybe,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. And then he nodded off to sleep.
Pity, I thought. In a way he reminded me of my grandmother, born in the hills of Moravia, a place where over a lifetime, without once leaving the village, one could find oneself living in four separate countries. History looms large for the seventy-plus crowd, and while the sands of time have largely been benign for the last generation or two, I sensed that we were on the cusp of something momentous and unprecedented, and I hoped to be able to ride it out so that I, too, decades later, could greet foreigners on a train while resplendent in tweed.
It is but a two-hour journey from Shanghai to Hangzhou, and I left the train for a grubby train station, where the taxi drivers weren’t at all confident where West Lake was.
“Bloody hell,” fumed an English backpacker. “What, is it not far enough? They don’t think they’ll make enough money?”
“No,” I said to her. It’s interesting how quickly China can reduce the traveler to a state of rage and confusion. “In all likelihood, the driver is from some distant town and has never encountered a foreigner before and probably doesn’t know how to read a map.”
I felt like an old China hand.
At last, with map in hand, a note with my hotel’s name in Chinese characters, and with my big dopey laowai grin that suggested I could be easily overcharged, I finally convinced a taxi driver to take me onward. I had assumed Hangzhou, on the shores of famed West Lake, to be a town of modest size.