Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [65]
Eventually, we made our way through this teeming city to the very edges of West Lake, which shimmered appealingly in the hazy light of late afternoon. We drove along Hubin Lu, and then we drove back down Hubin Lu, all the while with me beside the driver, sputtering, No, this way…no, no, turn there…it should be right there…okay, just stop here and I’ll find it myself. Which I did thirty seconds later. It was an unusually fine hotel for me in China. It was no Grand Hyatt, of course, but there were Chinese men in golf shirts in the lobby pondering the purchase of a condo from a sales group offering luxurious abodes in the sky in a place called Upperclass. This must be like what Miami felt like in 2004, I thought. I wondered what the Chinese word for “subprime” might be.
I checked in, pleased that while the dollar might be slipping into the abyss elsewhere in the world, in China, which pegs its currency to the dollar, $35 and a bit of haggling gets you a mighty fine room in Hangzhou. I dropped my bag off and walked toward the lake, where I soon found a statue of Marco Polo himself. There was a walking path beside the lake, and beside it were speakers piping in ambient traditional Chinese music, which is rarely ambient, but did seem so here. On the footpath, a policeman was chasing a man pedaling a heavy black bicycle. He reached for the back grille and grabbed it and then the two men began to argue violently, which seemed interesting to me, this lack of deference to policemen, until finally and unhappily the cyclist turned around, muttering darkly as he sped by.
There must be some sort of code enforcement here, I thought. So far this footpath was the only place in China where I hadn’t found myself beseeched by beggars and hounded by pimps. I found a sedate restaurant that offered superb crab dumplings and mushrooms, and thought how amazing it is what the Chinese can do with fungi. We just squander them on top of pizzas or ignore them in our salads, but here in China the mushroom gets the respect it deserves.
It was dark when I finished, and I wandered back toward the general vicinity of my hotel. Now, in the dark gloom, I was approached by the familiar touts and purveyors of counterfeit shoes.
“Nike, Adidas,” said one. “Good price. You buy?”
“Bu yao,” I said, and stepped inside a well-lit convenience store to buy some water, since the likelihood of finding tap water anywhere in China that isn’t contaminated—either with parasites or industrial waste—is approximately nil. As I went to pay, a man pushed his way up before me and demanded a pack of cigarettes.
Now, I want to be clear about this. I am very open-minded when it comes to other cultures. By this time, it did not trouble me—well, okay, it troubled me less—that men in China would hawk enormous globs of phlegm and send it hurling forth before you like a wet, gloppy fusillade. But this cutting-in-line business? It continued to steam me. I took a deep breath and reflected on the Chinese context here. Perhaps if I’d been raised in a country of 1.3 billion people, a country that on the surface seemed to be organized on largely Darwinian principles, I’d be a pushy line-cutter myself. And then I extolled myself for my cultural empathy.
Outside, I cooled my temper with a refreshing gulp from a plastic bottle of what I hoped was clean-ish water—you really can’t hope