Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [75]
Perhaps it was just one of those things. Typhoons happen. Even super typhoons, though not very often. Perhaps it was some deity in the sky who saw that this guy who had lived on islands was on an island again and so why not send in a typhoon. But I knew that was not the case. I am dust in the wind from a deitological perspective. I come from a Catholic tradition, and that God ain’t personal.
More likely, this super typhoon was a harbinger of climate change. No single weather event, of course, is indicative of anything. Shit happens. Just because. But it’s difficult to spend a moment in China and not be utterly awed by the scale of the ongoing environmental catastrophe. Today, there is one vehicle for every forty inhabitants in China. In the U.S., it’s one vehicle per 1.25 inhabitants, so you can see where China is trending. Chinese oil companies are traveling to the ends of the earth to secure their oil supply: Sudan, Angola, Papua New Guinea. They even tried to buy Unocal, the eighth-largest American oil and gas production company. Together with India, there are now 2.5 billion people in the global economy that just weren’t there fifteen years ago. The consequences for the environment are alarming. The U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s population and emits 25 percent of the world’s pollution. So what happens when the Chinese, and one out of every five people on this planet lives in China, start to live like us? Sure, they deserve it. Everyone should have the right to have a car, to have heating and air-conditioning, to have a job in an office or factory. But from an environmental perspective, this is a terrifying development.
And meanwhile China rumbles in discontent. There are thousands of protests. In 2005, there were 87,000 official, government-recognized “mass incidents” among the laobaixing, or common people. Many of those protests occurred due to land seizures or corruption. But, according to China Daily, 50,000 of those mass incidents were due to pollution. It’s bad in China, really bad.
So I decided that I didn’t mind being stuck on an island during a typhoon. Putuoshan was an escape from that China. I spent my time in a tea room, surrounded by monks and golden statues of Buddha and the bodhisattva Guanyin, drinking a bottomless cup of green tea, and periodically emerging to sample the menu at the hotel restaurant, which steered me to such offerings as Pork That Tastes Like Fish, which is quite likely the most hideously foul-tasting meal that I have ever come across.
Finally, the storm abated. The eye had hit a little to the south in Fujian and Guangdong Provinces. Dozens had been killed. The roads were washed out. The coastal cities had been flooded. The water was still too rough for the jet boats to Ningbo, but there was a larger ferry making a run to Shenjiamen, a fishing village on a neighboring island, where I could catch a bus to the other end of the island, then another ferry, then another bus to Ningbo, and then a taxi to the airport, where I hoped to buy a ticket for the evening flight to Hong Kong. This stretched my ability to get from point A to point B to point C through the chaos of China to its very limit.
At the airport thirty miles outside Ningbo—sleek and shiny like every other Chinese airport I’d encountered—I approached the counter to buy a plane ticket. I was informed that it would cost 1,100 yuan. I had 900.
“No American Express!” barked the woman when I took out my credit card.
“How about Visa?”
“No Visa!”
“Is there a bank machine where I can access an overseas account?”
“No! You must go to Ningbo!”
“But I don’t want to go to Ningbo.”
“You must go to Ningbo!”
“Can I use a credit card to buy a ticket at the travel desk in the airport hotel?”
“No! Machine broken! You must go to Ningbo!”
And so I went back to Ningbo, to a business hotel, where I bought the plane ticket for 800 yuan.