Mr. China (3 page)

Slowly, an idea developed in my head: why not head back for England overland through China and take the Trans-Mongolian railway through Moscow on the way? So I started reading up about China and
found that the pass over the mountains from northern Pakistan had been opened. I heard that it was possible to follow the Silk Road along the northern edges of the deserts in north-western China.
There was also a southern route but no one knew whether it was open. I tried to learn the odd phrase of Chinese, for emergencies, but the words came out in a way that just drew blank stares. Still,
I persisted and, the following spring, I set off for China.

I went in through the Karakoram Mountains, where Afghanistan, Pakistan and China meet. The mountains there are capped with thick glaciers and in places the road almost disappears. At last it
descends towards the deserts in north-western China. Heading east towards Beijing, I followed a string of oasis towns on the edge of the desert. After ten days in a bus, aching and bruised, I
reached the railhead and boarded a train for central China. Three months later and a stone and a half lighter, I slipped through the Wall and crossed the grasslands to Moscow.

As I sat on the train through Russia and watched the endless pine forests recede towards the east, I couldn’t assemble all the things that I had seen into any coherent form in my mind: the
street urchin who pushed a knife through his wrist for a few coppers, the blind people’s massage parlour, the pickled human heads in an underground city, peasant villages and huge polluted
cities, the crush of people in the stations. But I had a sense of something so vast and so old, so chaotic and so utterly foreign, that it took me right out of myself.

I knew that I had barely scratched the surface, but I could see that hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese were on the march for a better life. It was like Hong Kong but on a cosmic scale. I
felt energized; there was such a sense of purpose in among the chaos. An age-old culture had somehow taken a wrong turn, but I could feel the determination to catch up.

And there was something else, something funny about China that told me not to take it all too seriously. I had just caught the tail end of the planned economy, where Beijing still tried to
manipulate the minutiae of China’s vast economy. On the macro scale it was madness; how could the bureaucrats in Beijing coordinate the annual production of a billion pairs of trousers, or
two billion pairs of socks across a country several times the size of Continental Europe? Even on the streets I often found that common sense seemed swamped by some vast nonsensical central plan.
It completely inverted the normal relationships where the customer was king. Here the planners provided everything and the customer, it seemed, was supposed to be grateful. Huge arguments arose
over the simplest of transactions. At times, for example, it might take half an hour to persuade a receptionist to let me stay in a hotel. She’d say that it was full and that there were no
rooms available. At first I was puzzled and went away wondering where all the guests were. But I figured out that under the planned economy, it made no difference whether a hotel was full or empty
and if there were guests there would be more work to do. Since everything was owned by the State no one cared; in fact, no one higher up even knew what was going on. So the receptionist would
simply announce that they were full and wave people away so that she could go back to her newspaper.

The trick was to come back with objections until they finally agreed to let you in. It was the same in shops, at bus stations, in restaurants or when hiring bicycles. Sometimes I had to persuade
a shop assistant to sell me something that I could see behind the counter; she’d say it had already been sold or that it was broken or that it was the last one and had to be kept for display.
I’d go into a restaurant and they’d tell me that there was no rice or I’d go to a bar and they’d pretend to be out of beer. I even found a restaurant in Xi’an that
closed for lunch. But after a while, I learnt to probe and question, cajole and persuade – and never to give in! So I barged into kitchens in restaurants to find something to eat and went
upstairs in hotels in search of an empty room; I grabbed whatever I needed from behind shop counters and searched sheds for bicycles to hire. Even going to buy vegetables was a challenge but I
sensed a rapport with the people I met; it was almost as if they enjoyed the game of wits and they often gave me a laugh or a smile once they finally gave in. I never felt any malice from them; it
was more like a bad habit that no one seemed able to kick.

There were many other habits that could push a newcomer into either loving or hating China: the extreme curiosity towards foreigners in the 1980s, for example, or the dogged adherence to
incomprehensible rules. When the attendant on a railway carriage woke you up in the middle of the night for the third time to clean under your feet with a filthy black mop, just because there was a
regulation to sweep the floor every two hours, you would, as they say, either laugh or cry. There wasn’t much middle ground. On the other hand, ordinary things like hotel notices or
restaurant menus were full of bizarre rules and mistranslations. There were signs everywhere that said ‘Beware of Smoking’ and ‘Stop Spitting!’ The regulations in the
Shanghai Peace Hotel included restrictions on ‘bringing poisonous or radioactive substances into the hotel’ or ‘letting off fireworks in the room’, as if such matters were
perfectly normal occurrences. Also banned was ‘fighting, gambling, drug taking, whoring or making of great noise’, and there was a rule that no guest was
(sic) ‘
allowed to
up anyone in their room for the night’. Another hotel had a brochure which described its wonderful gardens and said that they hoped that ‘all our guests will be depressed by the
flowers’; the Chinese version meant ‘impressed.’ Restaurant menus were similar; I found an upmarket restaurant in Guangzhou which served ‘camel’s hump in wonderful
taste’, ‘double boiled deer’s tail in water duck soup’ and ‘roasted sausages in osmanthus flowers’. Another one down the road, which was slightly more modest and
obviously trying to attract foreigners, had its menu in English offering ‘lunch on meat with egg’ and ‘scramfled egg with lunch on meat’, but it rather lost track with the
‘squid beard’ and ‘fried field snail in bear sauce’. I thought it must have meant ‘beer’ sauce, so I looked up the Chinese characters, but they seemed to mean
something to do with ‘bell peppers’ so I was none the wiser.

Over and above the chaos on the streets, the mistranslations and endearing absurdity, there were huge changes under way that brought to mind the old aphorism attributed to Napoleon: ‘Let
China sleep, for when she wakes up she will shake the world.’ True, China was starting from a low base but the vast majority of the changes was positive. The UN reported that in the 1980s
alone over a hundred and twenty-five million people had been lifted out of absolute poverty. I became convinced that the country was on the way up as the shackles of the Communist system fell away.
There was a sense of optimism everywhere, a feeling that things would continue to get better.

So, by the time that I left China after that first solo journey of three months back in 1988, I knew that I had found something that completely absorbed me. I felt that it might change my life;
and it did. In retrospect, sixteen years on, I can recognize something common in many people new to China. I had become almost intentionally dazzled. I had set off wanting China to be something
special and therefore it was. It was a kind of wilful infatuation.

When I got back to London, my head was still in China. I found myself straining to catch the odd Chinese character out of the corner of my eye from the top of a bus, or
absent-mindedly wandering towards Chinatown to rummage in the bookshops and enjoy the familiar smells. I had found something new and exciting but in London little had changed. Two more years up the
ladder, many of my colleagues were climbing a structure without ever pausing to wonder whether it ought to be climbed. I couldn’t reengage. I couldn’t take it seriously when, on the
other side of the globe, an epic struggle was under way.

As I sat in an office dreaming of the chaos, the packed railway stations and crowded street markets, I toyed with schemes that might get me back there. Surely with changes on such a scale and at
such a pace, there had to be a way back for anyone willing to take a risk? I spent hours every day dreaming about starting a business out there, building pagodas in the sky and scheming.
Eventually, I went to see the senior partner of the firm to ask whether he’d send me back. I thought that I might be able to persuade him to set up an office in China to help clients invest,
but the interview was a disaster. I had been shown into an office and my heart sank as I saw the figure behind the desk: late-fifties, perfect blue pinstripe, silver hair with not a strand out of
place, hands resting palms down on the surface of a huge pine-wood desk in an office overlooking the Thames. There was something unnerving about the desk, that enormous clean expanse of bare wood;
an uncluttered desk shows an uncluttered mind, I supposed dejectedly. So the interview went about as badly as it could have done; he clearly thought that I was a lunatic. So I went back to my desk
to hide. But after a while I thought, ‘Sod it!’ I found a Mandarin course and handed in my notice.

About a week after I left my job, I suffered a momentary loss of confidence. The headline on the front page of
The Times
describing the crisis in Tiananmen Square read ‘Peking in
flames as China slides into Chaos.’ My mind flew back to the last few hours I had spent in Beijing a year earlier, just before I got on to the train to Moscow. I had sat for a while on the
steps of the huge monument to the People’s Heroes in the middle of Tiananmen Square. The old men were flying their kites; beautiful yellow paper kites, with lions’ heads and
dragons’ tails. I watched as they shuffled back and forth across the paving in their soft cloth shoes and the kites swooped and soared around the great stone obelisk. Everything had seemed so
calm then, perfectly set into its allotted place. But a year on, after the tanks had rumbled on to the Square, the world had changed.

When I got back to China in the summer of 1990 the monument was all fenced off and surrounded by guards. As I stepped out on to the vast open surface of the square, people were tense, unwilling
to engage, wary of contact with the few foreigners who had returned to China. The last rays of the setting sun caught the yellow tiled roofs of the Forbidden City. In the distance, I could see the
faint smile of Mao Zedong on the Gateway of Heavenly Peace, the face in the giant portrait silently watchful. A smile just like the Mona Lisa’s: serene, humourless and utterly ambiguous
– just right for a tyrant.

The atmosphere in the university where I had enrolled in a Mandarin course was just the same. People were cautious. It was no time to take risks or to stick out from the crowd, so it took
several months before I was able to make Chinese friends.

I lived in the university for nearly two years. At times, I was the only white boy among a thousand Chinese. Foreign students were kept apart in a separate building. There was a campaign against
‘spiritual pollution’ but after a while Chinese students sought me out. Their natural curiosity soon got the better of the vague regulations designed to separate us. It was still a
novelty for them to talk English to a foreigner rather than reading it from a book. When the first few students found that I was receptive, many more followed.

My time at the university was my first brush with the real China, the China from which you cannot escape. At first it was intimidating. For a start, I wasn’t used to the constant
intrusion. There was never a second of privacy, never a moment of silence, a moment for repose, or an opportunity to gather one’s thoughts. I was bombarded with noise: at six o’clock
the campus speakers blared out marching tunes for compulsory early morning exercises; at ten-thirty they announced lights out. I often came back to my room to find a line of students waiting. There
was no escape from the endless, grinding requests for English lessons. I could see why there was no Chinese translation for ‘privacy’ in my dictionary; the concept didn’t
exist.

I wasn’t used to all the restrictions imposed by the authorities and matters were made worse by the vagueness of the regulations. I was jumpy because I never really figured out what I
could or could not do. Once my brother came to visit me in Beijing and slept on the floor in my room. The next morning the Dormitory Chief, in his blue overalls and thick glasses, arrived
stony-faced at the door. He had been tipped off by one of the girls who delivered the hot-water thermoses that I had a guest in my room. He was furious because I hadn’t asked permission. I
apologized and said that it had never occurred to me that I needed to ask; we weren’t doing anything harmful. But he wasn’t to be put off and it developed into an unpleasant row. My
brother had to leave and find somewhere else to stay. A few days later I went back to the dormitory office; I wanted to avoid any more exhausting scenes like the last, so I called through the
little hatch to the Dormitory Chief and politely asked for a copy of the rules. He said that I couldn’t have them so I asked, ‘Why not?