The Hustle: China
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See Intro –
Next entry, “The Hustle: Delhi”
1.
Seeing History in the Present: Levity
There’s something about China that I’ve never seen anywhere
else. Here’s an image: it is 9pm at
night and dinner has been consumed. The streets have a loud rumble to
them, and part of it is the buses and the cars that drive through traffic like
traffic laws had never been written; part of it is the music from the elderly
practicing their dance forms and exercising outside their homes on the sidewalks,
in parking lots, on public spaces, on private spaces; and part of it is the
children running around on the streets and the sidewalks and around the homes
and in the parks; but most of it is this energy that’s made when every single
person in the city is out - whether it’s in Beijing or Luoyang or Xi’an.
It’s as if they’d been hiding in their homes all afternoon to avoid the
thick, humid heat and the swarms of people (all millions and tens of millions
of them) to come out at night and really get on with things, like playing poker
on the corner with a couple of beers, a few packs of cigarettes, and bowls upon
bowls of salty peanuts.
On the streets of the cities and in the town center, every single
person is out to make a living and they want you to know it, from the moment
you wake up in the morning to see little old ladies selling meat filled bao zi
for breakfast until the deep evening, when children’s toys are being played and
squeaked into the night sky: “San quai qian! Liang ge san quai qian!”
There’s audio tapes of the hustle when the hustle needs a rest, “Four
buns for 1 yuan! Come and get some nice, hot buns!”
***
My company and I joined the hustle. After arriving in
Beijing, we immediately set on an aggressive itinerary through the July heat,
my company explaining that he has not arrived in China to “sit in the hotel
room.” This involved:
(1)
A Hustle up to the Great Wall where we stood nearly packed with
other tourists at Ba Da Ling, mainly Chinese, to scale a multi-thousand mile
wall and manage to cover about 400 meters in 2 hours standing nearly jam-packed-still
with a million Chinese tourists;
(2)
A “let’s get ourselves lost so we can understand Beijing” Hustle;
A shortened version of the conversation is:
“Can you please
look at the map?”
“No. It’s
raining, and this is how I explore new countries. I get myself lost and
then find my way so I know my directional sense.” right, that’s a lot of
logic there.
Silence. 45 minutes later,
we realize we have gone into a large circle, and we’ve only covered one “block”
on the map. Beijing is the size of a small planet.
“Beijing is huge. It looks like
the first ring circle is as large as San Francisco.” [there are 8 ring roads, or concentric circles]
“Yes, that’s
correct.”
“I should look at the map.”
“I believe so.”
“Are you ready to kill me?”
“I’ve been
considering it for some time now.”
(3)
A Hustle through the Forbidden City where photographs were taken
every 3 feet:
“We will never
get through this place at this rate.”
“You
need to be more patient. I’ve never been to China before.”
“I’m serious.
If you take a photograph and spend that much time to set up, we will
never get through this.”
Three hours later.
“You were right. I think we should hurry up.”
(4) A long, dragged-out walk from the lively, music-playing, Karaoke singing, shopping Hutong District near Bei Nan Hai, that ended in a 45 minute silent shuffle back to our hotel, where I had my eyes on putting one foot in front of the other for fear of feet mutinies, and where my company saw a variety of interesting things: a small child behind the counter of his dad’s lamb skewer shop while the dad slept on a bench, construction work inside a new building at midnight, a Chinese Hell’s Angels ride, and a group of people haphazardly trying to fix a telephone pole (we think).
Nothing, though, prepared us for the professionally organized Hustle
in Luoyang during day 5 of our trip, orchestrated by my aunt, Da Yi, who sent
us up and out of our hotels at 7am to go on a tour van with my forcibly sent
cousin and two other random families, a very nice Chinese family from Xi’an and
a confused Swiss family who appeared to have confused their trip to Boudreaux
with one to Luoyang. The main focus points of the trip involved visiting
two sites, very far from one another, ShaoLing Shi and Long Men Grottoes, all
in one day and to get us back by 6pm for dinner, or else my Da Yi would make
sure that this tour group guide and his driver would never get another customer
again, and did that tour guide know it. This involved being timed to the
20 minutes, which involved being shuffled from the van to the tickets, and from
the tickets to the sites, and ultimately which involved walking at a pace that
made my hips sore and my quads ache all in the July, 100% humidity heat and 100%
squished onto the millions of other (literally, millions) tourists’ bodies.
Here now, we come to one of the highlights of the Luoyang Hustle.
It is about 90 degrees, and all 12 of us are stuck in a van meant to take
9. Suddenly, the van slows to a stop on a dusty road, and we look up to
see that there is a long line of traffic...of tourist vans and buses. At
this point, our driver shuffles us all outside into a tourist trap of a
building that sells some kind of pots and art work with all sorts of hidden
White Man Taxes, no air conditioning, a very questionable “bathroom”, and a lot
of indoor smoking and the sound of spitting.
My company and I walk through the tourist trap with little interest in our heat delirium and leave with the other families, who hop back into the van, aka the Microwavable Death Box.
In the Microwavable Death Box, my company loses his composure,
“Fuck this! It is so fucking hot, and we’re expected to sit in traffic in
the middle of nowhere! Why is there traffic in the middle of nowhere?
That’s it, I’m going to go hide in that bamboo forest.” The two of us exit the Microwavable Death Box
and hide in a bamboo forest on some old lady’s back yard with the excited and
unfriendly dogs, and the confused old lady staring out her window and shaking
her finger at us. It is in this moment that the Swiss lady, stuck in the
very back row of the Microwavable Death Box with her two young sons, looks out
the window and sees Tweedle-dee-dee and Tweedle-dee-dum hiding in a random
bamboo forest on some old lady’s back yard, trying to escape the heat. It
is in this moment that we see her smile, no, laugh, for the first time all day
since 7am when the van picked them up from their hotel and dragged us all up a
mountain in Shaolin Shi and hauled us through the temples and into the crowds
and then back on the van again to go to the Longmen Grottoes only to stop at a
tourist trap of a shop for 45 minutes.
In the July heat. In the 100%
humidity. Breathing on top of one
another and inhaling the thick air of each other.
It is a brief moment of levity before our driver comes back, and
we are forced into the van again with a shout, the door closed, and we being carried
on to our next site.
***
2.
Remembering
History in the Past: Weight
The July tourism in China feels like riding the rush-hour bus in
Beijing, but we had a few moments - a rare glimpse of quiet, enough quiet to
think a bit and reflect - where the enormity of everything we were surrounded
by - the enormous Buddha statues, all hundreds of thousands of them, carved deeply
in the caves that stretched along the river in Luoyang, the temples and the
discipline of the martial artists in Shaoling Shi, the beauty of the Great Wall
as it weaved west from Ba Da Ling, the gold plated roofs of the Forbidden City
- nearly made everything else bearable. The awe came in from the enormity
of it all, the audacity, and absolute disregard for human limits to make
something so absolutely grand and terrible all at once. If beauty and
cruelty could be in bed together, you’d find the bed in the World Heritage
Office. It was as if the everyday life
of the average Chinese citizen during the Tang, Qin, Song – or any of other dynasties
through and including Mao until China’s Open Door Policy – were dedicated to
building a temple for this life or building an afterlife for the emperor or
building a revolution for the People, a hustle from generation to generation to
worship, build, and die.
***
Grieving an ancient world monument isn’t
a great way to understand a history. But
then again, neither is the absolute worship of it. It’s as if all the symbolism of power and
slavery is placed in one, breath-taking view for people to travel across the
world to see, “Hey! Look at how many
people died making this! Isn’t this
country great?!” To stand in absolute
awe at the creation of absolute power – to be seen from the moon, for the
purpose of the immortality of a dynasty and its art, woven into a history of
one hustle to another hustle.
We saw the incarnation of that spirit
in the streets of Beijing, in the parking lots in Luoyang, in the martial arts
academies of Shaolin Shi, the activity and desire to build for worship, to
build for building, to make something withstand time to give a name to the
history of a people. Two thousand years
ago, a wall was built to symbolize the seriousness of the Hustle. Today, cities and skyscrapers are erected
with the same moving fervor to show the world the Hustle hasn’t died, and
instead of a defense made of stones, China has a defense made of economic
activity.
Ironically now, with a rising
disposable income, China’s citizens can travel from afar to look at the
greatness, the sheer volume, the audacity and terror of its own history, woven
along the thousands of miles of the wall, along the faces of the caves, from
one temple to another temple, from one dynastic clay army to another gold
plated palace, built by the bones and with the spirit of both a breathtaking
and unimaginably cruel art – and inherit the Hustle.
