home->places->china

China Notes

BY KEVIN FOSTER
March 2005

Correspondent, Kevin Foster, provides a Londoner's viewpoint of China. Kevin was recently travelling through China on his way to Singapore where he will be living for the next two years as a business editor and writer.

Guangzhou, southern China

In the five minutes it took me to check in to my hotel and get up to my room I'd seen three western couples with Chinese babies. Over the next five days I saw perhaps 40 or 50 in total. All the couples were American, most seemingly in their late 30s; the babies looked no older than six months at the most.

Guangzhou is the transit point for orphans from across China to be adopted out of the country. Later a woman told me the whole adoption procedure takes about six months of checks and paperwork in the U.S., after which the applications are processed through Beijing, after which the babies are processed through Guangzhou. I don't know whether the parents have a choice of child, or what kind of checks they have to go through, or how much they have to pay. Whatever, it must be far easier than adopting in the U.S.

I didn't know how to feel about it. The parents were obviously in a state of long repressed ecstasy, and the genuine adoration they had for their new babies was touching. Most of them seemed to be lost in their own worlds; the mothers would aimlessly circle the hotel lobby, crooning to the babies, patting them, or making up for two unequal lifetimes of absent affection by endlessly kissing their unprotesting faces. The babies themselves seemed unusually well-behaved, almost shell-shocked, readjusting perhaps to the unaccustomed attention; but they were unarguably going to have a better life in the U.S. than they could ever have expected growing up orphaned in China.

Most of the babies were extremely cute in that way Asian babies always are, but one I saw had a hare-lip, for which she'd probably get far better medical care outside China (or if not, would she feel more like a freak in America than she ever would here?).

But there was something about it I couldn't accept. The babies, supposedly nameless until they were collected, all seemed to have been re-christened Jonathan or Jane or Mary-Elizabeth, as if their new life was going to wipe away any trace of the culture they'd been born into. On a deeper level it was obvious that an industry was growing up around the adoption process. I overheard a Chinese woman telling an American man that she'd just returned from Shenzhen, on the coast.

"Did you get the babies?" he asked.

"Yeah, we came back with nine," she said, casually, as if it was no more than an average crop, or a fair return for a day's work. I wondered how much money she was making, whether she got commission for each baby delivered.

It seemed like a last vestige of colonialism, aptly set amidst the decaying Republican-era banks and embassies of Shamian Island. If a developed country runs short of resources at home, there's sure to be plenty available to exploit (in every sense of the word) in other, poorer parts of the world.

How China's one-child policy fits into it I don't know.

The 45-minute flight from Guangzhou to Hong Kong was filled with parents on the first leg of a flight back to Newark or San Francisco or Atlanta, all to the accompaniment of a caterwauling howl from the babies. In the seat next to me an Asian girl, perhaps ten at the oldest, spent the first few minutes of the journey rearranging the in-flight magazines in the seat pocket, and the next half an hour staring at me with huge, expressionless eyes. She didn't react when I smiled back. Across the aisle from the mother, the father sat between two other Chinese girls of about the same age, who fought and cried with obvious American accents.

"It's her first flight," the woman told a couple in front of her, stroking the head of the reactionless child. And later, "We think she's about nine, but we're not sure."

Something about the unknowability of those about-nine years, how they'd shape whatever identity she'd end up with, stuck in my head and wouldn't get out.

--

It's kind of childish to laugh at other country's mistranslations into English, but these are too good (or confusing) to resist:

'Please do not spit everywhere and litter up. Violators will be amerced (sic) with in a range of 20 to 50 yuan.'

- a notice in Shamian Park

'Fried pork with mincing rice' - on the menu.

--

The hotel where I stayed is on Shamian Island, a small area of reclaimed land jutting out into the Pearl River. Shamian was the old foreign concession, and is full of decrepit colonial buildings which once housed various banks and trading houses that had now given over their ground floors to shops selling tourist tat. It seemed aged, genteel, totally out of place and time compared to the rest of the city.

Across the river is the Qingping market, which apparently was one of the first markets to reopen when the Communists began to loosen their control of the economy. It used to be a center for trade in exotic creatures, and although that's now been stopped there's still plenty of more familiar animals for sale. The streets are narrow and broken, thick with people dodging bikes and motorcycles; filled with hawkers selling birds in cages, puppies surrounded by wide-eyed children, cats - including a couple of kittens crammed into cages barely six inches square - turtles, fish, and hundreds of tiny, inch-long gray scorpions heaped in plastic buckets.

Men pulled carts along behind them, holding onto two long poles. An old woman carried two baskets on either end of a pole slung across her shoulders; she wore one of those wide-brimmed straw hats that rise lazily into a sharp peak. In back alleys no more than ten feet wide houses opened out on to the street, children played football with screwed-up pieces of paper.

Inside the houses, families were eating, often in dark rooms lit only by the television. An old man, maybe 70 years old, stood behind a barred gate, smoking and watching the street. An unending hubbub of voices seemed to my ears to merge into a continuous, clattering, clamorous sound. The streets smelled wet, occasionally acrid and then sharp and searing as I walked past baskets of spices. Older people, mainly women, played Mahjong, while younger men played cards. Sometimes people would stare at me for a couple of seconds, then look away. Only once did a man call out hello, and then burst into laughter when I answered him with a nod.

--

I climbed to the top of the pagoda in the Temple of the Six Banyan Trees.

The pagoda is eight-sided; in the center of each level is a small room, no more than six or seven feet wide. The entrances into the central rooms are no more than four or five feet high, and I have to crouch as I pass through in an enforced act of submission. Six golden statues of the Buddha sit in alcoves in the walls; the Buddha holds up his hand in different poses - index-finger crooked, middle-finger and thumb forming a circle, flat-handed.

On the top level, the ninth, the central room is locked behind a grille; one-yuan notes litter the floor around an embossed gold pillar. The pagoda is perhaps 40 metres high; I walked around the narrow balcony, holding on to the waist-high barrier for reassurance. At some point I lost count of the number of sides, and kept expecting the entrance to the stairway to be around the next corner; for a few seconds I think stupidly but scarily that I will be stuck here forever, circling above the city, always keeping the figures of the Buddha on my right and never finding the way down.

The temple complex is made up of five or six buildings, all of which have sloping, wooden rooves with upturned corners and Chinese characters engraved in gold below the eaves. In the building directly to the west of the pagoda are three huge golden statues of Bodhisattvas, each about 25 feet high.

On the walls are paintings of monks, some of whom have grotesque, elongated faces; one reaches up to grasp what looks like a basket hanging from a ceiling and his arm stretches slim and elastic until it is 30 feet in length, like some ancient superhero.

Devotees buy packets of incense and light them from open flames, hold them in clasped hands as they pray.

The banyan trees are nowhere to be seen.

Outside the gates Guangzhou is noisy, crammed, urgent, full of shove and intent; here it is open and peaceful and not trying to become anything it isn't already.

Shanghai

Somebody once compared the changes taking place in today's China to New York in the 1890s. Shanghai seems to have the same brash, unbounded optimism that I imagine must have fuelled the rise of Wall Street a hundred years ago. The place is a swamp of money and it's impossible to move through the streets without being overwhelmed by it - the malls, full of western and Japanese stores; the half-built skyscrapers and office towers; and most of all the people, Shanghai's nouveau riche strolling along Huaihai Road on a Sunday afternoon, trailing shopping bags and label-laden children. The women seem on a mission to dress more fashionably than anywhere in the world, although in their rush to display status something of the up-market call girl has crept into the look - knee-high leather boots with stiletto heels and leopard skin shoes are everywhere. There's something eager and fragile and self-conscious about it all, as if everyone's been hit by a great wave of consumption and isn't yet sure that they've found their footing again.

I'm sure at the back of everyone's mind is a memory of how different things were only ten years ago, and the fear that it could be all taken away - and so, grab everything now while the going's good. There's none of the assurance of New York, the decades of earned and inherited wealth that has seeped below the skin of the city. No-one in this generation is going to sit back and enjoy what they have.

The more I travel, the more I realize that England is an excessively polite nation. I long ago gave up expecting anyone to react to an 'excuse me', but I'm used to people actually moving when you push past them on the street. In Shanghai people seem perpetually braced against one another. The idea of personal space also seems alien here (Mao, are you laughing or crying?), as does the distinction between the sidewalk and the road - pedestrians seem inexplicably unconcerned by oncoming traffic as they stroll across the street, while mopeds apparently prefer to weave their way through the crowds on the sidewalk when it would be far quicker for them if they were to get back on the road. And the taxi drivers make New York cabbies seem laid-back.

Unlike in Guangzhou, I didn't see a single poster of Mao or any of the other Communist leaders. Sometimes it felt as if you could be in any capital city in any developed country in the world, until a glimpse down a narrow side alley revealed houses sloping into one another, laundry filling up the sky and old men and women standing in doorways, looking out, perhaps feeling more like a stranger here than I did. Every so often, a troop of 20 or 30 soldiers would monopolise the sidewalk, either marching stiffly in step or sauntering along, talking on cell phones and smiling at the girls cycling past. No-one paid them much attention.

--

I’ve come across Manchester United themed bars in Singapore, Hong Kong and Guangzhou, so it was a nice change to see a Man Utd massage parlour in Shanghai. I considered it for a moment, but the thought of Gary Neville giving me a rubdown put paid to any temptation I might have had. (For those in the States, substitute Man Utd for the Yankees and Gary Neville for Jason Giambi – you get the picture...)