You can't miss the strangeness of China. It starts with the language, which along with being unintelligible to untrained ears, is indecipherable when written. And everything else looks different too: high-rise buildings are covered in tile like bathroom walls; cars are tinny and tiny, styled like children's toys; home decor combines overstuffed furniture with garish prints and lurid colors.
So, after getting over the shock, I am surprised that, more than anything else, what I feel when I take in the sights around me is nostalgia. Beneath the surface, China reminds me of America when I was a kid. Or, since memory (especially mine) is notoriously unreliable, China reminds me of the way we like to think America was, before it got ruined with technology and anxiety.
Look at it this way. On our neighborhood street, there are no chain stores or franchises, only mom-and-pop shops. Even when you don't stop to buy anything, the owners wave hello and call out a greeting. Men wear suits or sports jackets, not T-shirts and shorts, woman wear sun bonnets. Neighbors meet and idly chat, adults walk arm in arm with grandparents. Kids play on the sidewalks, rolling hoops, pulling toys, or chasing dogs. Dogs run loose, without leashes, and without dutiful adults carrying pooper-scoopers.
Mandated safety is almost nonexistent. Cars have no seat belts, huge dump trucks spew out clouds of black exhaust. Welders assemble crude metal frames in the open, working with only a piece of smoked glass for eye protection. Painters spray the finished products with no greater regulation, and the fumes drift right up to the ozone layer. The idea of suing a corporation for endangering the public health is not even on the radar.
I'm not saying it's better here, only that it's familiar from my past. But I confess to feeling affection for a place where preschoolers are free to drop small pieces of paper into open fires, where broken glass can be a toy, where burning a plastic fork and listening to the melting globs zing to the ground is an acceptable form of diversion for a four year old. I'm sure any parents reading this are now reaching for their heart medications, but I did all of these things when I was a kid, and I'm none the worse for the scars.
This city of several million still has a small town feel. The hottest entertainment venues in town right now are the cigarette machines. They are rigged up like a carnival contest. After inserting a coin, you use a joystick to maneuver a mechanical arm inside a glass box over a pile of cigarette packs. If you're skillful, you can scoop one up and drop it into a chute where it slides to your possession. Men mob around these machines three deep, day and night. When you're done with that and you're still feeling lucky, you can shoot an air rifle at a board covered with balloons, or toss rings over snow globes in hopes of winning a prize.
What passes for 'adult entertainment' here is the theater which presents live dancing girls. Judging by the advertising posters, the outfits that they wear are less revealing than what you see on a 'family' television show in America. When the dancing revues are not in town, the theater shows racy movies, where the woman wear low-cut blouses over lacy bras, and, if the ads are to be believed, they actually kiss men!
Parents of teenagers can take some comfort in knowing that adolescents here do not look like thugs and sluts. Juvenile sex is about as likely as free political expression. Even the college students look unaccountably virginal. We have heard unspecific rumors of male-female couplings, but it's hard to imagine. The girls (and in good conscience, I can't call them young women) are so demure, and the boys are too earnest.
Twice a week, I meet informally with the freshmen English majors. They come with questions about language and customs, and for two hours we talk about whatever is on their minds. One day a girl asked me to talk about "love". I wasn't sure what angle to take, so I asked her to clarify her question. Her explanation was pure and unselfconscious: "Our teacher asked us to write about love, but I have no experience."
The students are enchanted by romantic Hollywood movies; they all love "Gone With The Wind" and "Roman Holiday" (which I had to admit, I'd never heard of), but for most of them, the closest they come to romance is in online chat rooms. For the adventurous, the campus has a "Lover's Lane" (that's almost a prefect translation), where boys and girls sit on benches holding hands and staring dreamily at the city skyline.
The options for a social life here are constrained. Alcohol is forbidden for students, drugs are not considered. Even playing mahjong is against the rules. The other night I went to the college Talent Show. The kids solemnly took turns at the microphone, with construction paper contestant numbers pinned to the jeans, and offered karaoke renditions of mawkishly interchangeable ballads. There was not a shred of irony or a sliver of decadence.
Occasionally, to enhance their stage appearance, one of the girls (or boys) would wear some eyeliner, a little lipstick, and a mime's circle of rouge on each cheeks. But in general, these kids could fit right in at the church social. If you used your imagination, you might be willing to concede that some of the audience members were less than entirely wholesome; there's a boy with deliberately messy hair; there's a girl who 'bleaches' hers from coal black to a deep brunette. But the juvenile delinquents here look about as threatening as Fonzie.
I have a sense of personal safety in China that I haven't felt since I was a child. Part of it is connected to the privileges of being a revered foreigner, but even among local residents, the idea of being mugged or assaulted is absurd. You can forget about being shot, since private gun ownership is unknown. The most serious crime most people will experience is bicycle theft. (But replacing a stolen bike is easy because there are so many hot ones for sale.)
You don't have to remind me that my security, in part, is a consequence of China's totalitarian government. And I know that while Americans may be more likely to get shot by a street punk, the Chinese stand a greater chance of being flattened by a government tank. It's not a utopia here, and there are rumblings of discontent. Not everyone was happy in the 50's in America either.
As much as I enjoy the benefits of repressions, I can't help but wonder about the dissidents. After the 50's came the 60's, and we all know what that did to America. Somewhere among the 1.3 billion citizens is China's Jack Kerouac, somewhere an Asian Alan Ginsberg is writing his version of "Howl". As interesting as China is now, it's only going to get more so. And I can't forget that in China, the wish - "May you live in interesting times" is a curse.
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