China to Japan
April 6th, 2007 — -Japan. This Japan. All bows smiles and helpfulness and konichiwa’s and hajimemashite’s…
Can these be the people who marched into China, all the way to Nanjing, and quite literally, took no prisoners? It does not quite seem possible. But then what doe two nuclear bombs do for an attitude adjustment?
No one knows, except the Japanese.
I am here in Osaka, my 4th day in Japan, heading to Kobe, Okayama, and Hiroshima.
In four days, I have been able to discern, based on this local sample, that these are the most helpful people on earth, Coming from China, home of the barbarian horde, as I came to call it, it’s a culture shock like I’ve not had in recent, or even distant memory.
China was all spitting, pushing, arms and backs, assholes and elbows, on every corner, in every queue, in every stinking shop window spewing this, that, or another animals living, quivering not-yet-remains into the murky, dusty, soot-cement-dust filled air.
The air in China is a piss-water aquarium; how many minutes, nay, seconds, into the day before that first burst of rotten everything, emenating from a crack, door, clod of festering earth thrown into the road the night before, would pierce my senses?
Thirty, maybe, at most. My face grabs the air like a crab claw, constricts like a prune, and I am suddenly imitating the state bird of China.
Don’t know what it is? Here’s a hint: Grab the bottom of your toes from inside out with your throat, and curdle up every ounce of mucousy debris in your body - CCHHHCCHCHCCHCCUCCCHCHCUUUCHCUUUUUUCUUUU
UUUCUUUUUUUUUUCUCUUUHHHHHUUHHHHHHHHH-
TTHHHTHHTHTHHTPPPPTPPPPPPHPHPHPHHPHPPHPH
PHYYHHHYHYHHHHYHHHUUPPPPPUUUUUUHHHPPPPPP!!!!!!!!!!
Like you were inventing a new way to hock a lugee… you hear it so often on every street in Beijing, you wonder what the hell is wrong with everybody. Then you breathe what they breathe - the air, thick from the dusty land, compounded by the constant contruction, starting at dusk and racketing all night in every city;
And then you eat what they eat - that yellow, pesticide sluice squeezed out of soy and rapeseed and palm kernal and god-knows-what that coats everything like a veneer of industrial shallac, like ball-bearing grease, like I don’t know what… but I know one thing…
There’s a funny joke that goes around vegetarian circles, that we in the U.S. consume more animal products than anyone in the world; that we have the poorest diets; and that most ‘traditional’ cultures are mostly vegetarian. Some joke.
Or, maybe it’s true, if you’re willing to consider hearts, kidneys, lungs, instestines, terrapins, turtles, frogs, birds, bone, glands, stomachs, feet, heads, necks, legs, backs, valves, sacks, eggs - fertilized and quite ripe with just-about-to-hatch life, tails, gizzards…did I mention lungs? That is, if these are vegetables, then the Chinese are the most vegetarian people in the world.
And bless their brutality, because they don’t flinch. They aren’t lost in pretending that the world isn’t what it plainly is for them: A rather brutal struggle for existence and survival, against a land that does not yield much, and does not yield easily, and a governance that does not give a good goddamn about the welfare of any single person or family over any other, or over any single very important person.
You can’t accuse them of cowardice, of shrinking away from the act. There is blood, and vitreous fluid, and life’s essence everywhere, in every meal, on every plate. The fish comes out of the bucket, the scissors go in, a hard twist, twist, twist, the gills tear away from the flesh, and dinner is halfway there. Sure, the animal is still moving, but que mal y-a-t’il? Life consumes life, that’s the way it goes.
China is the end of what I thought was possible in a culture. It is a world of wreckage and garbage, of constant, never-stop, never-say-sleep construction…and more than anything, of an immense disregard for even the idea of quiet, reflection, identity, personal space, self-analysis…all of those things that our immense bounty have given us in our leisure time.
What makes us not them? We live in a country, the US, that births fields of edible everything, with such copious generosity you’d be given to imagine that we did something to earn it.
We didn’t, but it’s still ours. We’re poisoning it, reducing it, burning it away for commodity’s sake. And someday, we may be the hard land that gives little and demands a lot.
You don’t see many weak or infirm people on the streets, in Beijing, Shanghai, or Nanjing. You get the feeling that the unfit do not survive long past birth, and that the Greek system is in effect here - an early burial, or a hillside crib, for newly born weaklings. I don’t know precisely, but I have seen only a few beggars, and they look like the ethnic minorities.
Some men, mostly women, Mongolian faces, wide, ruddy faces, bits of woven, threaded color in their clothing, run up to me, keep pace with me, quicken as I quicken, and don’t ever move away. “Xie-xie, xie-xie, xie-xie,”they say, Thank you, thank you, thank you, with arms outstretched.
One woman sends her three-year-old child to beg from me, as she watches from twenty paces. I can’t give her money now. She has prostituted her child for her own needs, and, I suppose, his too. But I can’t do it. My hand rests briefly, lightly, on the top of his head. Thick, straight, black hair, an adorable boy, you just want to pick him up and take him away from her, and you wonder if you could just make her an offer.
We (I’m travelling with a friend) see a number of American and English ‘So you’ve decided to adopt a Chinese baby’ couples, bringing their darling and handsome ones, well-fed and clothed, back to the land that spit them out. This little boy will never be one of those. His mother hasn’t abandoned him, though maybe she should have, to some English couple who can spoil him rotten with clothes and love, for his beautiful smiling face and adorable cuddliness.
Four hundred paces later, I relent, and decide to go back. Either I’m somebody who gives money from time to time, or I’m not. And I am, and always have been.
When I return to the spot, on the new super-hotel highway, near Tiananmen square, full of bright light and ghosts unable to displace themselves, she and her son are gone.
I wanted to ask her, ‘Who are you? How did you get here? Why push your infant son on tourists to squeeze money out of them?’
It’s a stupid question. Money. Money for food. Money for warmth. The same reason why the Thai and Phillipina girls in Hong Kong will rub their tits in your face for 20 dollars, or will have sex for a hundred or so.
Money for food, for family, for warmth, for clothing. Money for survival.
There’s more to say, and it’s all hard to process on the road, and now, here in Japan, where everything costs twice what it does in the states, I wonder if anything is real at all, because moving from country to country, it seems like a wild fantasy dream of endless inversion. It’s hard to know.
That little kid got to me though, and I kept looking at my hand, that brushed his hair, and I did not have any idea what to do about any of it.
On the way back to the hotel, we passed a man, one of several we saw - blind, perhaps no eyes at all, playing the one-stringed instrument you hear when you hear Chinese music. I like Chinese music, at least, these instrumentals, with its weaping, laughing, singing, jabbering alto, and he played it with feeling and form. I gave him something like a 5 dollar RMB bill, that’s something in China, but hardly anything to us - about 2/3rds of a US dollar.
Here are a few pictures of the man, and his instrument.
More soon.
April 27th, 2007 at 7:22 am
I received a comment from a reader with this critical point: “That there is more to China than a few big dirty cities…”
I want to say, the point is absolutely correct. I wouldn’t presume to try to describe the entirety of a nation in full fairness in a single blog.
For every lousy event, every pushing, shoving individual, there are a dozen, or a hundred individuals taking care of their families, going to work, caring for their children, siblings and parents, and doing their best in life.
That’s true in America, too, and everywhere.
But what I wrote is also true, it is absolutely true, and it is not said often - that is, I never heard it before I went - and it’s important.
China is not as described by PBS - neither as the future of world economies, nor as the home of the bird flu. It is something of its own history, geography, and existential temperment.
However, it is not the world of ringing gongs, chanting monks, silk banners and lamplight that the various propaganda outlets would have you believe.
And there are profound, absolutely profound tempermental differences between the Chinese philosophy of life, and that of the Western Judeo-Christian world.
Each will have its absolute failures, and better successes versus the other.
But, who can get all of that into a single blog?
I will, time and tide permiting, come back to describe further events. There are a million stories, and I will encourage those with their own, to tell them. I will do my best to tell mine.
May 10th, 2007 at 10:07 am
Received a note from Sepp Hasselberger:
Isn’t it quite overwhelming to see their culture (even the fact that they have one that is comparable in importance to our own) after we’ve basically been told that ours is the only “civilization”…
Dear Sepp,
it is amazing to know that within our one world, there are fifty thousand or so different planets…
That is, you are correct, Asia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, India, these are flung far from the Western wheelhouse, cultural history, mores, norms, values, customs…but that sounds like some sociology class.
It is more that the ground beneath your feet is different, when you are in different places, and the crops that grow, and the air that you breathe, is wildly different, and breeds that difference in the people that pop up like seeded plants all over the land.
It is one thing to be a poor country - China is an impoverished country - but there is a wild, profound ideological separation, that is the fabric upon which people hang their lives. I’m thinking about Mao, about the integration of king, president and pope into one individual - Emperor.
In Europe, the kings were overthrown by a peasantry fed up with unecessary poverty (due to radically uneven distribution of wealth and murderous taxes). But the land in Europe could support its peasantry - that is, it is a fertile land, and so allowed that redistribution to commence through revolutions and civil wars.
China has not got that luxury. The best they could do was wrest themselves from feudalism and bundle into a sharing system, that murders the king, but also the Pope, and reassigns both power bases into one person. What a recipe for disaster, history tells us. As the people now look to their leader not only for economic and legal structure, but for psychological and spiritual salvation!
Imagine the strain placed on a people, to have to match the vicissitudes of one individual assigned to this position - but you don’t have to imagine, we have the living memories of Mao, Lenin and Stalin.
It’s a funny thing, but when a state murders religion, the state becomes the church, and that never works out, I think.
Amazing discoveries, difficult travels in some ways, because I dislike and avoid the obvious tourist attractions, and in China, you either hide your head in the grotesqueries of ‘We Built This For The Western Tourists’, or you walk the streets with everybody else. There is no middle ground, no middle class. No place where the people go when they are not busy work, work, working, that is lively and communal and fun.
Or, there are some places, some karaoke palaces, but it’s truly locals only. It’s a tough place to visit if you don’t want to buy into the Western tourist model (shopping), and you just want to get to know the people.
I was in the cities, too, and perhaps it is different in the country. I don’t know, people I met seemed to have a better time, a more open interaction, in the South West, away from the calamitous east coast of China.
So… more notes, I’m still processing, processing so much of what I saw (ate and drank). But really, just trying to catch up with what I witnessed, by reading, by letting it unravel, by talking to people who’ve been around the world more than I.
It’s a bit of a strange trip, still.
September 27th, 2007 at 9:17 am
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119083065737640157.html?mod=hps_asia_whats_news
China Recognizes Dangers
Caused by Three Gorges Dam
By SHAI OSTER
September 27, 2007; Page A6
BEIJING — In unusually frank language, Chinese officials publicly acknowledged “hidden dangers” at the massive Three Gorges Dam, including landslides, erosion and pollution that could lead to an environmental disaster if not quickly fixed.
“If no preventive measures are taken, the project could lead to catastrophe,” the official Xinhua news agency said on its English-language newswire, paraphrasing experts speaking at a conference this week. As an indication of the government’s sensitivity to the issue, that phrase wasn’t included in all versions published by Xinhua.
The comments are among the first official acknowledgments of unexpected environmental problems triggered by the dam, one of the world’s biggest man-made projects.
The dam was built to contain the ravaging annual floods of the Yangtze and to provide China’s growing economy with a cleaner source of electricity, but it also became a sign of the costs of China’s rapid development. From its inception, the dam has been the target of criticism for the forced relocation of more than one million residents, burial of important historical relics and its radical reshaping of the Yangtze River basin, among other issues. Early criticism of the dam was often harshly suppressed. Construction of the dam, which cost at least $22 billion and was begun in 1994, still isn’t complete.
The officials’ remarks came at a meeting called to discuss the dam’s impact. “We can by no means relax our vigilance against ecological and environmental security problems or profit from a fleeting economic boom at the cost of sacrificing the environment,” said Wang Xiaofeng, director of the office of the Three Gorges Project Committee of the State Council, the administrative office in charge of building the dam, according to Xinhua.
Other experts at the meeting said the reservoir had triggered life-threatening landslides, and they warned that downstream riverbanks were being eroded. State media said the participants found the dam had a “notably adverse” impact on the 400-mile stretch of the reservoir. The vice mayor of Chongqing, a large city along the reservoir’s banks, said the Three Gorges shores had collapsed in 91 places.
Mr. Wang said Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao had raised the issue of environmental problems at the dam during a meeting of China’s cabinet earlier this year.
Another official, Li Chunming, the vice governor of Hubei province, through which the Yangtze River flows, warned that water discharged from the dam was eroding protective downstream embankments. Scientists say the river is now flowing faster because silt that used to slow it down is trapped behind the dam.
In places such as the village of Miaohe, the threat of landslides is so severe that villagers are being forced to relocate, as reported in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal on the dam’s growing problems.
“The problems mentioned in The Wall Street Journal should merit adequate attention from all of us,” said Mr. Wang of the council’s project committee, according to Xinhua’s English-language release.
There have been several recent landslides in the region, including one on June 28 that killed four villagers, according to a local-government Web site. Four other villagers remain missing.
All this comes as China grapples with a mounting water shortage. Across the country, millions of tons of raw sewage, industrial waste and fertilizer runoff have turned lakes into algae-covered cesspools. According to official statistics, more than half of China’s major waterways are so polluted that fish are dying or water is unsafe for drinking or irrigation. More than 300 million people — almost one-quarter of the population — lack access to clean drinking water, the government says.
The government has been stepping up efforts to rein in the environmental toll of China’s breakneck economic growth. Yesterday, China’s cabinet approved a five-year plan laying out major goals and measures to tackle pollution. “China is suffering from increasing conflicts between economic and social development and constraints in resources and energy,” the State Council said in a document, according to state media.
November 29th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
[…] wrote about it a little bit, Here and Here, but haven’t quite had the heart to get back to it in full. Somewhere inside, there […]