Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [67]
Though few Chinese participate in sports themselves, they are not without activities that they turn to as sporting endeavors. There is, of course, bargaining. The Chinese excel at bargaining. They live and breathe it. This game of parrying back and forth is not played with hostility, it’s just mindlessly played every day for almost everything. For spectator sports, however, the options are more limited. To be sure, there is professional soccer. And there is professional basketball. It’s a good league too. The Chinese, in general, are not the tallest people in the world, but in a land of 1.3 billion people, there is bound to be a large number of statistical aberrations. Indeed, the tallest person in the world is Bao Xishun, a seven-foot-nine Mongolian herdsman famed for once being called upon to use his lengthy arms to reach deep into the throats of two dolphins who had swallowed bits of plastic in an aquarium in Fushun. But other tall people have found their way to the sport academies and now play some really good professional ball. Indeed, Americans, those who were good enough to play college ball but not quite good enough for the pros and just can’t let go of the dream, have found themselves playing in the Chinese league, and as I watched them on television I couldn’t help but wonder what on earth it must be like to be big and black in China.
For everyday spectator sports, however, the Chinese have turned to arguments. Nothing attracts a crowd in China like a good quarrel. This was my observation on the shores of West Lake the following morning. Two elderly women had stopped before a park bench where they were engaged in an argument of epic proportions. They screamed. They mocked. They waved their hands in threatening manners. They did not strike each other. But they wanted to. You could tell. All around them, people had stopped to observe the commotion. They had halted their lakeside perambulations to view the goings-on. There were dozens of people, then a hundred or more as the ladies argued. It was a flash crowd. I could imagine the text messages: Two old women going AT IT beside West Lake. 9:47 AM. Be there.
I had come to West Lake because it was said to be serene, and I wanted to see what that felt like, serenity in China, and so I kept walking. In the botanical gardens, there were temples and pagodas and ponds full of goldfish. They were all replicas; not much of Hangzhou survives from its glory days as capital of the Southern Song Dynasty. What wasn’t razed during the Taiping Rebellion of 1851 was finally destroyed during the lunacy of the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, not much of old China can be found anywhere, since so much of it was built with wood. But that’s okay. The Chinese are very good at replicas. In fact, the shoreline walk around West Lake seemed sort of ideal from a Chinese perspective: It was both tranquil and fake, but not fake in a bad way, fake in a new and improved sort of way. At the eastern shore of the lake, I came across a woman on a bench who was feeding dumplings to her Western boyfriend.
“You will be a sex maniac,” she said. It’s what I do in China. Eavesdrop.
Shortly thereafter, I opened my wallet and discovered that I was in need of money. China is largely a cash-only economy and so I headed over to the Bank of China, where I hoped to find an ATM that could manage an international transaction. I found one, which asked me for my pin number in English, but after I’d entered it the next screen appeared in Chinese, making it a trifle challenging. Was I getting cash or was I transferring my entire savings to an account in Laos? I fumbled with the keypad, and afterward, flush with cash, I walked toward the streets of downtown Hangzhou.
Suddenly, a man with a wild, leering expression appeared beside me. “German?” he said mystifyingly. I told him no and kept walking.
“Money,” he said. I ignored him and walked on. Suddenly, from behind, I was struck hard.
“WHAT THE FUCK!” I yelled. Pain seared across my ear. I whirled