Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [82]
While Shenzhen is indeed richer than it was before—far richer—it is still, frankly, a dump. True, from the train platform we could see a skyline of cranes and glittering skyscrapers, but everything else built over the past twenty years had already become decrepit and forlorn. The Chinese are said to venerate the old. Perhaps this is true when speaking of people, but it doesn’t apply to buildings. Still, there were millions of people now occupying these apartments. Most were women attracted to the region for the factory jobs, but more than a few had come to serve as girlfriends, professional and otherwise, to the wealthy businessmen crossing the border from Hong Kong. I had surmised from the daily offers for messagees and night ladies that every city in China had a thriving sex industry, but the one in Shenzhen had been deemed such a threat to public welfare that the government undertook a shaming campaign, rounding up the city’s prostitutes and forcing them to march through crowds of people who hurled abuse and scorn upon the women, a tactic last seen during the Cultural Revolution. Within months, however, the prostitutes were back. They might not become gloriously rich, but they’d at least divest the rich Hong Kong johns of some of their wealth.
The train continued its journey onward. We passed rubble. Lots of rubble. It really is quite amazing how much rubble there is in China. “It doesn’t feel like San Francisco anymore,” Jack observed. “This is more like Tijuana.”
As we traveled on from Shenzhen to Guangzhou, we passed vast numbers of factories and crossed over pools of still water bearing wholly unnatural chemically-induced colors. We rumbled past enormous mounds of trash and the ever-present piles of rubble. We began to think of a new slogan for China.
“China—A Giant Pile of Crap,” I offered.
“China—It’s Chinastic!”
A short while later, we arrived in Guangzhou. Jack knew someone who knew someone who knew someone in Guangzhou, and this alone had seemed like a good reason to visit. Also, I did not want Jack to be lulled by Hong Kong, to think for a moment that Chinese cities are anything other then bastions of swirling mayhem, and invariably, as expected, and as I had explained to Jack’s disbelieving ears, after passing through Immigration, we experienced the assault upon the senses that is contemporary China. In the hallway, we were quickly surrounded by aggressive men yelling, Taxi taxi! Tour and hotel operators shouted at us. People clapped their hands in our faces. Laowai! Laowai! Beggars thrust their hands before us. Money, money! Touts marched beside us. Make love Chinese girl. The policemen looked stupendously bored. “No, Jack,” I said to him when he moved to accept a ride with a gypsy cab. What was he thinking? Jesus. This is a train station in China. These are vultures, these people who linger here.
And then there was the taxi line, a long, snaking length of people—people who pushed, who jostled, who spat out wads of phlegm and clouds of smoke, people who cut in line, goddamn it. I am not the sort of person prone to going postal, but if ever it did happen, it would be in a line in China.
“Well, this is different,” Jack observed.
“Good. I’m glad you found what you were looking for.”
Finally, we made our way into a taxi. True, we could have avoided the line by agreeing to a gypsy cab. But while there was a one-out-of-four, maybe one-out-of-five, chance that this regular, state-sanctioned, official taxi driver