FIRST VISIT TO CHINA - 2003

Found my letters about my very first visit to China five years ago, when things were very, very different, kinda ...

WHAT NOW, UNCLE MAO?

Finally got up to Mainland China yesterday, but only into the SEZ (the Special Economic Zone: Beijing's first attempt at Capitalism).

Keith and I took the train up to Shenzhen, and I'd love to say good things about the place but, in all truth, I can't. I came back feeling sad and out of sorts and have remained so today, unable even to get up the energy to change out of my pjs. Trying to put my finger on what's wrong, I think I was eventually overwhelmed by all the sino-hostility; all those wafting waves of detestation of and disgust with Westerners.

And they aren't nice people. Everyone is out to scam and con and they all see westerners as suckers and I think it eventually got to me. Sino-Capitalism, based solely on making a great deal of money very fast, does not make for attractive and caring social-interpersonal international relations.

Depressed! Yes, that's what I am. China deeply depressed me.

But that doesn't mean I have to stay depressed! I think I need to GET OVER IT!!! LET IT GO!!! "Out with the bad, in with the good!" Clean aura! Clean aura!

OK, not working; so, in an attempt to clear my aura, let me tell you what it is like. In fact, pretend you're me:

You catch the train in the huge station of Hung Hom in Kowloon - amazingly, you didn't check the timetable in either direction and yet arrived 5 minutes before the train pulled out each time (and I don't think it's like Hong Kong, where there's a train every three minutes.) I think you just lucked it! (2008 - Actually, there's a train which leaves every 20 minutes)

You also lucked it by buying First Class tickets which you initially thought was a waste of good spending money but then were grateful for because the train was so crowded you would have had to stand the whole hour it takes to get there. (2008 -You can't get first class tickets anymore - but if you go towards the carriages at the front of the train, you can usually get a seat.)

Shenzhen itself is bizarre. Let me see if I can make you visualise the journey so you realise why:

The modern and open-plan train with plush purple seats in First Class quickly leaves the city highrise behind, then, past the environmental ruin of near-city wasteland, you reach New Territories and it suddenly gets pretty and scenic with mountains, hills, cliffs, rocky outcrops, wonderful waterfalls, jungles, mountain streams - all very rustic and natural - only with landscaping and walls and pagodas and nice pieces of reglious art all around, attractively tucked into the trees, because this is China and they're a very old civilisation with the time to get this type of stuff done - and down here, it wasn't all destroyed by Maoists - and then you're out in the vast green plains and farms. Not so many Fijian and North Queensland trees out there and it got so eventually I didn't recognise any of them. (2008 - will post my letter about how odd the trees are in HK, if I ever find it.)

Then, right when you're totally into a bucolic state of mind, you come round a moutain and, without warning, rising out of the plain ahead, BOOM!!!, it's Shenzhen.

And Shenzhen is not just any city but the spookiest space-age city you can imagine - think The Jetson's cartoon - with all these giant Art Deco, Gotham-city type towers, rising up on what is essentially farmland. None of the usual slow build up to city - just CITY!!! In the middle of nowhere! Astonishing!

And then the trains slows and you're in Lo Wu, the border town.

Crossing the border? The Hong Kong side is easy-going but so crowded. Yup, those obligatory 10,000 people whose sole job seems to be to stand in front of you are again in front of you.

And then, once through border procedures and customs, blah, blah, blah, you walk across a river that looks sooo like a Chinese river you wonder how they've managed it. Maybe it's the quality of light or the way the light falls on the water but for some reason this river makes you really feel like you're in China.

And then you're over the bridge and, yup, you've walked straight into the most tight-arsed bureaucracy on earth, which makes you REALLY know you're in China.

This is where you need your visa which, la la la, you didn't have because you believed The Word that you can get a Visa there for 100 yuan as opposed to HK$180. in Hong Kong itself. And the word is true. Yes, indeed, Only your obligatory 10,000 are in front of you again and so the agonisingly slow shuffle starts all over again.

FYI: If you're Albanian, Gambonian or American, the Visa will cost $400. because China doesn't like those countries and doesn't want to encourage "those sorts of visitors!" (2008 - nations who have to pay four times the price change regularly; it's just whoever China is annoyed with at the time.)Strangely, I got such a buzz out of having a visa into China. I kept looking in my passport and grinning. And they spelled my name correctly too and how good is that?

I won't take you through the whole China-border crossing etc, since it's restricted information but I will tell you they have signs all over the place that say things like "No Lingering" ,"No Loitering", "No Standing Still", "No U-turns", "No Turning Around" and the strangest one "No Refluence."

I have no idea whether or not I refluented, but I got a sudden sharp and painful punch in the back when I stopped to put my passport back into my bag. Turned with the intention of giving whoever delivered that punch a really hard slap and a mouthful of abuse, but it was a Red Guard with a machine gun over his shoulder.

I felt like I should just go ahead and slap him anyway but Keith wasn't with me - being lost back there among his personal 10,000 - and I thought I was sure to be dragged off and never be seen again and Keith wouldn't ever know what had become of me and that would probably make him rather sad, so I decided to play it safe and inform the Oz Embassy when I got back and ask that they request China issues a warning to Red Guards NOT to go around punching visitors because it ain't hospitable and welcoming, but then I decided just to let it go ... unless, you know, it happened again.

But wait! This story is meant to be happening to you, so let's get me out of there:

And then through Immigration and, dah dah!, you're in Sino-Mecca. Sino-Captialism's greatest accomplishment - no, make that Capitalism's greatest accomplishment: a city solely designed for SHOPPING! SHOPPING!! SHOPPING!!!

Actually, I'm going to stop writing now. I'm feeling so much better I think I'll go have a bath and get dressed. I'll pick up the story later.

DO YOU SWING, DENG XIAOPING?

Where were we? Oh, that's right! The doors open and the angel trumpets blare and there we are: Communist China!

SHENZHEN

The first thing you see?

massive billboard

Nicole Kidman as Sateen,

on the swing,

advertising

"Moulin Rouge",

and you really don't know what to think!

but know in your heart

that millions died

for this poetry!

And then you dive across the ring road (2008 - how I wish I'd written more about what this looked like back then, because it certainly doesn't look like this now and I have no photos) into LoWu Commerical Centre; a five storey building that they funnel you into quick-smart, because this is where it all happens.

Well, there's very little you can say that's new about 9 hours straight shopping, although it's very interesting to do it surrounded by armed khaki-clad soldiers, machine gun over the shoulder, who stride around, looking purposeful and hard, exactly like they've stepped out of a Maoist propaganda poster and are now auditioning for a similar poster for Modern China, only they don't realise that modern China won't be using soldiers in their new propaganda posters.

They will, and I promise you this, be using "Linglei" - the dreaded Armani-clad hooligans who are the real face of modern China. We saw lots of them since they make up almost the entire population of non-soldier Shenzhenians.

And I have to say the Linglei look good. Very sharp and snappy with lots of interest, care and attention to The Details of what they're wearing. They reminded me most of Teddy Boys, those English Mods from back in the 60s, although the Linglei do put their own Italianate twist on it. But the vanity and the chesty-strutting and the posing and the hair-stroking are the same.

The women? The female Red Guard look wonderful but the non-soldier women don't cut it in the snappy-dresser department. If I were to tell you that Hong Kong women do it so much better than Shenzhen women - and you know what I think of Hong Kong women's clothing sense (2008 - gosh, hasn't this changed so much. HK women now look sublime!) - I think you'll have some idea of how awful the Femmo-Shenzenians are. They look like Mormons, to be honest. All badly cut T-shirts and frilly tiered skirts. Very sad, really. (2008 - Shenzhen women look better each time we go up there.)

But back to the soldiers who were definitely the most interesting part of the day. Do you realise they actually DO wear those red arm-bands just like they do in the movies? And some of them - especially the ones with inch-long spiked hair - look exactly like those muscle-man soldier action
figures that little boys play with, pretending they aren't dolls.

Apart from the punch in the back during the border-crossing, we had no interaction with them, but I did see a group of female ones standing around in a girly-huddle giggling about some of the better looking male ones, which is always a nice heartwarming sign of genuine humanity.

But I wouldn't count on it. These People's Liberation Army guys give me the chills BIG-TIME. Like, when they raise a hand to say you aren't to photograph them they are so scary you don't dare.

Oh, but we did see this cutest Red Guard couple, seeming so in love, giggling as they double-dinked on a bicycle. Naturally we started to sing "Raindrops keep falling on my head", but stopped when we realised Chinese don't get American popular cultural references from the 70s.

But what else can I tell you about Shenzhen that you can't guess for yourselves? Nothing really. It's shopping, shopping and more shopping! And we really only had time to do LoWu Commercial Centre and the main street before we suddenly realised it was nearly 11 pm and we weren't likely to get a train back. We raced back to the station to find out if there was another train or if we should book a hotel room, and discovered the last train was leaving in exactly five minutes. How lucky was that?

But this is meant to be about you:

So there you go. Shenzhen. You walk around. You look at things. Every now and then - OK, every three minutes - you see something which takes your fancy. The trader notices and takes it out and displays it to its best advantage. You bargain the price down from stupidly cheap to freakishly stupidly cheap. You buy. And then you move on.

You're a shopping-locust, really!

It's only really interesting because no one speaks English, so you do it all in sign language and with reference to catalogues and calculators.

Oh yeah, must tell you: the calculators are really nifty; they type in the chinese character for a number and it appears in western numerals on the screen. And then they hand you the calculator and you type your number into it - it also has western numerals on the side. And so it goes, back and forth, with the Linglei trader throwing in all sorts of melodramatic faces and gestures to indicate you're killing him. It would be fun if you didn't sense they not-so-secretly detested you to the very fibre of their beings.

And everything is very buyable. You need to bring a fortune with you to do the place justice. Most of the stuff is genuinely beautiful, although it's a big problem that they don't distinguish between the genuine and the fake. Some of those genuine wood carvings, jade carvings, coral carvings, jewelry etc are sublime; genuine works of art, and no more expensive than the junky mass-produced possibly-plastic ones. The entire city is about marketing those products and services China does best, which naturally includes the real stuff as well as their ability to fake every product on the face of the planet, and they appear equally proud of their ability to do both.

And everything is stupidly cheap. And so much choice. There are entire floors of shops devoted entirely to crystals, both real and fake. And others to fossils. And then whole floors to fabrics. And
others to electrical goods. And another floor is entirely devoted to tailors. (I'm already scouring magazines looking for clothing I want copied.) And what else? Remembering we only really did one store? Buyables? Boots. Jewelry. Shoes. Bags. Dior Stores totally devoted to fake Diors, like the entire range of everything, and Chanel shops for Chanel, and Louis Vuitton and Hermes and every other producer of luxury items. And there was even a shop devoted to Vivienne Tam and she's CHINA'S greatest modern fashion designer. Fancy not being above ripping off your own!!!

Well, we spent until we could spend no more and then we went off to try to find something to eat, and that's when we hit a snag. No one took Visa. And there were no ATM machines. (2008 - there's some just inside the doors of LoWu border-crossing.)

We were broke.

Stuck in China, laden with shopping, and it's got seriously cold and we're hungry and BROKE.

And then came the ugly face of China. No one would help us. No one would give us the time of day. Even the beggers left us alone. If you have no money, that's it! You're invisible! We wandered around for two hours, freezing, footsore and famished until we found a tiny little bank with an ATM machine down a scary dark alley and we got enough money to have a very fine dinner in Century Hotel (four stars) and for Keith to seriously assail the DVD stores on the main road for DVDs galore, while I sat in "Coffee's Shop" (that's its name; I'm not joking.) and drank real English tea and ate chocolate mousse and minded the mounds of parcels. And it wasn't long before I again started to feel human.

But what else can I tell you about China-SEZ? Beggers galore, all with serious deformities, most of them children or old people. And people really do wander around with bamboo poles on their shoulders, carrying their wares. And non-Linglei still wear the Mao-jacket and cap. (2008 - not any more.) Police everywhere. Soldiers everywhere. But they aren't there to help you. They don't have a mandate to serve the people like our cops do; these guys serve the Communist Party and don't let you forget it.

Is the place clean? Well, not really. I've had my standards of civic cleanliness raised to stupid levels by Hong Kong where every street has it's own houseproud old lady cleaner - it's what you have when you don't have an old-age pension scheme - who treats her street like her living room and scrubs it to an inch of its life. Shenzhen isn't like that. We saw lots of street cleaners but they're all male and don't take it very seriously, so I'd say Shenzhen is as dirty as Suva but not as dirty as, say, Calcutta or Bangkok or Cairo.

So there you have it! Shenzhen in a nutshell. We are going back very soon. I want to get in there among the tailors and upgrade my wardrobe MAJORLY. And I'd go to go back and look in the serious art shops. There are a great many of them. And I want to look at the real furniture stores.
Etc. Etc. Etc.

So that's it! Modern China! Uncle Mao must be turning in his grave.

Denise

2008 -

My attempt at artistic commentary

on Modern China has been thwarted

because you can't read what she's saying.

Probably just as well.