Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [70]
And there are unintended consequences to enforcing a One Child policy in a society that diminishes women. Today, there are more then 40 million men in China who will never find wives. That’s because the women just aren’t there. They were never born. Forty million men will thus never have children of their own, will never settle down in the sociocultural arrangement that has spanned millennia—that’s 40 million men who just aren’t getting any—and yet women are still treated so abysmally badly in rural China that every year another 150,000 women go on to kill themselves, most often by swallowing pesticides. It’s baffling, frankly. One would think that in a society with such an acute dearth of women, the remaining women would be swooned over, their every need catered to, that rural China would worship all things female, and yet, evidently, that is not the case.
I turned my attention back to this man on the ledge. Perhaps he had taken it upon himself to do what he could for gender parity in China. But did I want see how this ended? I did not. And I had an island to reach.
In contemplating my next move, I had set my sights on Putuoshan, a very small island in the East China Sea, about thirty miles off the coast of Ningbo. The bus to Ningbo was driven by a man with a fondness for swerving and blaring his horn, which could pretty well describe every driver in China. They are insane, these drivers; mad, crazy, dangerous. They drive angry, pissed off, aggressive. Cars, buses, trucks are just tools for them to say Fuck Off. That is how they drive in China: the Fuck Off school of driving. China has just three percent of the world’s drivers, but has a quarter of all people killed each year by cars. They don’t know how to drive in China. Really. Someone needs to teach them.
We passed a scene of rugged hills that appeared to have been chopped in half by a giant’s sword, and more power plants nestled next to black, dusty slag heaps. We progressed past a mind-numbing array of factories, big and small, new and old, until near a cluster of umbrella factories we joined a traffic jam that had gathered behind a truck accident. It was a minor accident, a mere fender bender, but rather than move the trucks to the side of the road and clear the lane, the drivers stood in animated argument, and as we finally made our way past, our bus driver yelled at them too, then resumed the speeding, swerving, and horn-blaring that made driving in China such a lively, hair-raising, really awful experience.
In Ningbo, I changed buses and bus stations. I can say with some confidence that the part of Ningbo located around the two bus stations is hideous. It was filthy. It was, of course, teeming with crowds. Cigarettes and phlegm hurtled through the air in every direction. The buses droned by in a blue haze of exhaust fumes. Soon, however, I was joined on my new bus by four older, very chirpy Chinese passengers. They joshed and laughed, and this pleased me, because so far Ningbo was a soul-crushing dump and it felt good to suddenly be in the midst of innocent frivolity. He was funny, that old man with the blue cap and the twinkling eyes. I only wished I knew what he was talking about. But he could tell a good story, that much I gleaned. We rolled out of the city on our bus of mirth. Even the bus driver was laughing. And suddenly, the landscape had changed. It was lush and green, or rather it was lush and green in the areas that hadn