Guangzhou Dispatches

The old man called to me from the side of the road. “Sit for a while,” he said. “Talk to me.” It was getting late. Aside for a few streetlamps scattered between the rigid blue refugee tents there wasn’t much in the way of light. The earthquake had extinguished the neon and once gleaming signs that still clung to the shells of abandoned buildings.

When I pulled up a rough wooden stool and looked at the man, close, for the first time, I saw how old he was. His face was creviced and deep, and the crags of his nose heaved his huge glasses askew and you could wonder if he had been struck by lightning. His block torso was tied to the faintest rods of legs, bent in two at the nub of the knees. He didn’t offer me anything to drink because he had nothing to offer. We sat and exchanged the usual pleasantries, and he chided me for getting a hotel room in the one hotel still standing in town (most visitors were funneled there, and my room was a converted gaming den - an air mattress stuck in the space between a mahjong table and the TV – no one in town seemed much in the mood for games) because I could share his bunk in the tent with him. I told him next time, I would take him up on his offer, and he smiled and looked off at the steam shovels still digging across the road.

It’s rare to find an old man all alone and I worried about asking the unthinkable, if his family was crushed when his city shook. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising in the midst of obvious devastation but it is, hearing people point out sites of death, watching them list family members gone with the vacant stare that comes from two months of grief. But the old man wasn’t one of those people. He lowered his voice as he told me. Years ago, while he worked, his wife started sleeping with his best friend. This was back then, long ago.

So the whole situation seems sort of ironic to him. How when the earthquake started and cracks appeared on the walls he could imagine chunks of his home cascading down and burying him, and how, now that he’s alone and he’s old and his legs don’t work well and his lungs seem to take in no air at all no one would hear him scream, and how he walked away from his ruined home with the slightest of injuries and wandered on the streets for hours, alone and unattended to as he listened to the shrieks of trapped neighbors. He didn’t know what to think about that.

We were in the remote mountain town of Qingchuan, five and a half hours along twisting roads from the provincial capital of Chengdu. The place simply materializes from forested nothingness. Sichuan is known for its natural splendor and is one of the top tourist sites in the country. The mountains here mark the edge of the epic ranges that dominate the province’s neighbor to the west: Tibet. It was little wonder that the man, originally from mountains to the north, arrived in town and never quite had the motivation to leave. He said he hadn’t seen his wife around for years.

We sat in the twilight, exchanging occasional grunts of questions but mostly just sitting there. After a while the steam shovels stopped. There was something approaching silence. It was stunning, this pause. No matter where you go in China there is a constant decibel drone, an omnipresence of sound, of noise, of life that takes months to get used to. And now there was almost nothing. Across the river, a lone player on a stringed er hu lobbed sad notes into the night air. I wondered how long it’s been since hundreds of people on the banks of the river cocked their heads to listen to melodies conceived so far in the past. Not everyone was listening of course. Some tents by the river glowed from within with television sets miraculously undamaged by the quake and then hauled to the shelters. The sets cast fantastical shadows against the light blue inside of the tents, larger than life etchings of humans that sat, unmoving, like statues. I took leave of the man and walked down the river. When I walked back, I saw that the man had moved off down the road. He had taken his stool and perched himself behind some people a few tents over. He slowly smoked a cigarette and watched TV over their shoulders.

As I walked back to the hotel, I came across a large group of smiling neighbors arranged as an audience before three almost painfully cute young girls. School had just restarted in the aftermath of the largest natural disaster to strike China in thirty years, and the girls had a new song to share. Everyone was on the street, under the tied canvass of temporary tents. They were seated on low wooden stools and the mood was joyous. They called me over and asked me to sit and watch the show. When the girls started with their giggle-laden song and dance the group roared with applause and the girls responded with gigantic smiles. When the song was over the girls, two of whom were twins, looked at each other and, unwilling to let the spotlight fade, launched into the song again.

The woman sitting next to me was a teacher in the local school, which had been condemned and relocated to a field of temporary shelters at the edge of town. “You know,” she said, “before the earthquake I didn’t know what an earthquake was. When it started I thought it was a war. And then I thought, why would anyone attack Qingchuan?” The girls had stopped their singing and ran off down the street to brush their teeth in the water from the tap set up for the newly homeless by a storm grate in the road. As they ran, the earth trembled beneath us and people across the street bolted from the lee of a building already splintered and heaving to the side. It was over fast. “An aftershock,” the teacher said. I asked her if she was ever scared and she laughed. Two months of this, she said, and it’s become routine.

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We walked through the empty rooms, Li Si, the student and I, squinting in the dark. The air was sticky and still, the way things are before the sky opens up with rain. It was somber in those bare rooms. Outside on the balcony we could see the splashes of light knifing through the building as it towered upwards. This wasn’t the only room cloaked in permanent night – floor after floor staked above us stretching to the dark gray clouds. We imagined what it would be like to learn this place was yours. We talked about what it would be like to know that you family’s centuries of fishing and farming were at an end and that this darkened shaft would be what replaced all that. Li Si had his camera pointed to the ground. Along the new white tile floor blackened paper was arranged in a series of clumps on the floor. Offerings to assure fortune for life between these pristine walls, sacred rites for a new home.

The apartment sat low within a forest of white towers with blue metal gates. There few people there the day we first visited. A couple of workers lounged below the bright red signs that stretched the entire height of the newly constructed buildings. “A Warm Welcome to the Villagers from Guanzhou Island,” one read in stark white characters. Everything was ready.

About a month ago my friend Li Si and I started filming a short documentary on a strange island on the outskirts of the city. The place is called Guanzhou, and in addition to hundreds of years of history this island village now also boasts a subway station. I fell in love with this place almost a year and a half ago, when the subway line was finally completed. You get used to weird things and startling juxtapositions in China – inevitable when things are changing so quickly – but there is something that shook me when I emerged from the subway escalators to face vegetable fields and a chicken scampering across the entrance. It’s just so breathless this whole development thing, so unrelenting how these villagers’ fates had already been decided in such an unmistakable way. I’m not some romantic, I came to Guangzhou because I wanted to see what the leading edge of the Chinese economic machine looked like. Yet it was clear there had to be some story here, something going on that would make sense of this well-trodden narrative of change and building and progress. It’s just so hard to describe what it’s like to ride the subway and emerge in glittering sunlight to encounter absolutely nothing. It stops you cold.

After discovering the place I visited about once a month. My favorite spot for a while was an abandoned tile home with regal columns, full ceramic bathtubs and floor after floor of western toilets. Everything had been trashed, but a large mirror inlaid with fish still clung to the wall – glued on and useless to scavengers. The top floor opened onto a balcony with a mattress. From the balcony you could see everything. To the left were still green waters of the village fishing pond. Beyond it the only thing that had spared this island its 21^st century facelift for so long, a lazy, meandering river. On the far shore lay another island, far more massive. This was University City, a former patchwork of villages and fields that had been converted, in about a year, into the home of 18 different universities. It must have been strange watching a new world arise before your eyes, but none of the villagers I talked to had much to say about it. And then, to the right, was the construction site. The plans are to convert Guanzhou Island into a Biological Research Island filled with laboratories and some factories, a process that first requires a tunnel to the academic bounty of University City. Beyond a crude brick wall the island becomes like an orange moon pierced by pole after pole of rebar. The main hole sinks far down to the ground. A portrait of Mao hangs over the entrance, hallmark not of some abiding patriotism, but of the fact that this is a government project, and there are standards to maintain. Soon after I started visiting the island, my favorite building was razed.

Not long before we started filming, I wandered through town because a local had told me there was a meeting of some kind taking place at the old temple. I showed up late, and the meeting had already finished by the time I got there. The main entrance was flanked by government officials, all of whom were not the least bit pleased with the wandering white guy loping through. The reason was clear enough. Inside the temple walls was a vast clear plastic case protecting an architectural model – a vision of the islands future. The thing standing in between the jittery government officials and the promises of sparkling new towers was, of course, the motley assortment of fishermen and farmers loitering in the main square. That day’s was a meeting of the near future, a discussion of what, exactly, the villagers could expect to get for their land, and where they’d be relocated to make room for the new world of biological research. Li Si and I had stepped into a firestorm. There is nothing more sensitive than this. Forget Tibet, Taiwan, the whole mess. It’s the farmers the government is afraid of.

I can’t claim ignorance about the whole thing. At first it was just a kooky island with a short life span. But illusions of a harmonious transformation evaporated quickly. Every year, by the Chinese government’s own statistics, there are tens of thousands of street-level protests. More often than not, these protests involve villagers, and they involve issues of land seizures (this still being China, no one actually owns the land they live on). Usually these sorts of things go undocumented and unseen (even factoring in the explosive rise of the internet, it’s a rare 40 year-old farmer with the wherewithal to spread news to the blogosphere) but in Guanzhou a particularly violent uprising somehow caught the attention of the international community.

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I got a text message from a friend I thought lost forever to the missed connections of people you meet traveling, the impermanence of relationships forged in transit. “Brother Kong,” it read, using my Chinese name, “Where I live has been shaken by an earthquake; it’s frightening. Tonight it is shaking again, I will soon collapse.”

I was asleep when he sent it and when I woke up in the early morning and saw it he had long since gone to bed, and now I’m sitting here waiting for him to respond. The truth is I’m not even certain who it is - the number was never entered into my phonebook and all I can go on is a feeling that a cell phone number ending in three 5’s seems vaguely familiar. It is, I think, the grandson of the woman whose funeral I attended when I traveled to Sichuan in February. The one who brought me into their time of celebratory mourning (“she is over 80, a full life” one told me then) and placed the dragon head over my own so I could dance. I think, as I wait for a response, how there will be no funerals like that in Sichuan now, how its not possible when rescuers pulling out so many bodies and worried about heat and decomposition cannot defer to custom but must rush bodies to the crematorium. How many of those bodies far from what could be justified as a full life. I wonder who will administer the rites when entire families, nearly entire villages, have disappeared. I hope he, if it is him, writes back soon.

I should have known when I heard the number what was to come. 7.8. Now revised up to 8.0. Funny how it sounds so unimpressive. My own life nearly ended 14 years ago in a 6.6 in Los Angeles, a mere aftershock by comparison, when my bookcase came somersaulting across the room and slammed into my bed, missing by inches (who thinks to bolt the damn things to the walls?). But this, this was something else. This was a seismic growl to end worlds.

And can you imagine? Images of places just sealed from the outside world and the weather too bad to send in the troops by parachute (parachute in because of the mudslides that obliterated roads!) so the entire advance rescue team just walked up the damn mountains on foot, rain slicked muddy mountains that contained within them death on a scale to set a nation reeling and just a small hope of some, injured but still alive, being pulled from rubble.

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“Mustafa is Mustafa. Mustafa will always be Mustafa. Mustafa can do good things, and he will still be Mustafa. Mustafa does not change. Mustafa can do bad things, and he will still be the same Mustafa.” Mustafa paused and looked at me. “I like doing bad things.”

He smiled. This he was relishing. Yes, there it is, the statement of fact. Good or bad, and who the hell would ever know the difference. And he likes that, just loves it. He can’t stop looking at me and I can’t stop saying how interesting it is that he just wants to damn the whole world. Those eyes, darker than anything you can imagine. We say nothing for a little while. Then he breaks the silence. “What do you know about counterfeiting?”

When I ran into Mustafa near Guangzhou, the only thing I knew about him was that he could dance. When he dances it’s like lightning bolts are hitting his shoulders. His arms swoop down and back up, graceful spasms of someone willing the music into his body. I wasn’t the only one to notice, not by far. He had a crowd around him, cell phone cameras pointed as before a rock star. None of the others here evoked peals from slender girls clutching their boyfriends’ arms, not the two young Muslims from the west, looking 10 and 14, themselves also roasting lamb and dancing next to their mother, but terribly, not the baozi minders, the oyster grillers, the sugar cane dispensers, the water vendors, the squid basters, not the coconut drillers, nor the purveyors of pocket knives, handmade pink chickens, Buddhist chanting cds, live rabbits, fortunes, electric trains and pinwheels, who stand yelling out prices to people who stare at them for a second and then yell right back. No, he was alone in this show. His frosted hair (deep and almost reddish under the crown of artificial blonde) was back in a ponytail and his shirt, white with a multi-colored quasi ascot astride the scores of brown oil stains, was loose and open to let the air flow in so everything was good and he could just ride the beat for a while. I asked him why he danced. He said he loved to dance, always had since his childhood in that faraway place. He grinned a massive grin, and twiddled his shoulders a bit, just to show off.

He’s a hard man to forget. When he’s roasting meat and dancing he can be resplendent in his sunglasses, electric energy amidst the smoke of endless rows of grills. I first saw him far to the north of the province, in an old industrial town called Lianzhou that, a few years ago, was seized on by urban photographers who turned abandoned factories into gallery space for an international photo festival. Of course, the vanguard of the new great Chinese cultural awakening needed snacks. Outside of the main town building, next to a replica of a Soviet MiG fighter jet, the food court had set up shop. In the middle of it all, crowds gathered in an arc around this dark skinned wonder, flipping and brushing and flipping and brushing the lamb. Some left with meat but most of them were there just to stare. They were too intimidated by the gyrations to approach and select a skewer, the most expensive meat on offer, thick and rich and nothing like the tiny slivers of flesh his competitors were grilling all around him. No bother. He picked up the roasting sticks of lamb and danced with them, luring the stunned Chinese onlookers to approach the hypnotic, simmering flesh. The breathless intensity reigned for hours.

We talked briefly then, enough for me to wonder how a giddy dancing Pakistani came to grill meat in some now avant-garde artistically reclaimed Chinese backwater derelict town, hours and hours from the economic boom areas that might draw those from afar. I never thought I’d see him again. In the intervening four months, I learned later, he swiveled and bopped through thirteen festivals, temple fairs, gatherings and performances. Every day, it seems, there’s a festival in this country, and, in Guangdong at least, Mustafa and the others were there for almost all of them, grills in tow.

Mustafa is, above all else, a griller of meat. A roaster of the highest order with secrets the Chinese he serves would never begin to understand. These Chinese. People, in fact, not only lacking, utterly, in appreciation for how to grill meat but the unfortunate inheritors of a culture and a country so eager to do things the fast way that they wouldn’t even recognize real meat if it was handed to them on a skewer. The west, where he’s from (well Pakistan by way of Turkey and Xinjiang, but save the details for later) feeds the soon to be speared and charred animals grass and only grass. The Chinese feed their animals trash, literally, oblivious to the fact that a few years down the line they get to eat that same trash themselves. If you ask him, Chinese people are like pigs, exactly like pigs. They don’t get angry, and it’s really hard to piss them off. But when you do piss them off, man they are annoying as hell. Also, they eat whatever you give them.

Mustafa also drinks. He’s a drug smuggler and an orphan, of sorts, and a failing entrepreneur with no thoughts on next week. He’s a wannabe counterfeiter and a smoker and the son of a man, he says, that killed one of his three mothers (but that would take a long time to explain). He’s the twelfth of seventeen siblings. He’s a self-sufficient vagrant set up, for now, in the immigrant-filled, built-from-nothing fantasy land of Shenzhen. He’ll turn 20 soon.
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I didn’t expect to see her lying dead there, so still, red scarf over her forehead and eyes like a cold compress against a fever. We aren’t trained to see a person truly inert and I could swear to so many things in that cold room – a flinch of her arm, a rise and fall of her chest from a woman startled, no, angered, that interlopers were brought to gaze at her wrinkled flesh. I could see my breath in the winter air and surprised myself by thinking she must be cold.

So we just stood there. The man who had brought us to the body, the woman’s son, held the blanket that served as the door and looked at us looking at her. He said not to worry, he wasn’t worried, and everyone knew this was coming. This wasn’t an official visit, just a peek, a quick view in the way that someone shows you the guest bedroom they just redecorated. So I followed the rivulets of folded skin down her arm with my eyes. She looked so old. Sunken into the table. Melted with total relaxation. If her spirit was gone, it couldn’t have gone far.

Moments before my friend and I had been sitting outside, a few feet away with plastic cups of green tea and forty people boisterous and confused and fussing all over us. It happens, you wander around looking happy and harmless and white and soon you’re holding tea and forced to sit down and you’re talking about all the NBA teams you know but you talk about two people only, really, just Yao Ming and Kobe (though connoisseurs ask you about Tracy McGrady). The man across from me was grinning wildly. His family and friends were all here and two foreigners wandering the back alleys of this lethargic town had been plucked off the streets. A feast was being prepared.

“This is fantastic, do you do this all the time?”

“All the time, no. Today is special.”

“Spring festival?”

“No. My mother is dead.” A lull. I muttered I’m sorry and he waved it off and laughed. I wondered if people would smile when I died, and I guessed it would depend on if I was really old when it happened. Another lull.

It was hard to know what to ask next. It would seem a little crass to change the subject now that I had realized I had wandered into a wake. “When did she die?” He screwed his head down. A genuinely good question, but he didn’t know the answer. He turned to his friends who were all watching us talk and asked them. There was some discussion and then general nods of agreement.

“About one or two hours ago. Let’s go see her!”

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How do you describe tens of thousands of people simultaneously convulsing with the desperate hope of catching a train?

You could start small. Focus on the furious blue-jacketed Chinese policeman screaming bloody murder when someone peeks over his section of the fence, while two meters away a stream of migrant workers scramble over that same fence, quick as marines. You could dip further into metaphor, as lots of news stories have, and talk about the bobbing homesick heads in Guangzhou as a sea or talk about the staggering forward steps, a crush of movement that recently killed someone, as a stampede. But then how do you talk about that scream, that rippling, rolling yell as an empty train finally pulled into the station? An earthquake? The ground, the people, everything, really, was shaking. You could talk about what it’s like to be stuck in the middle, your camera pointed and clicking while your feet don’t touch the ground because you’re packed in so close and your nose twitches from the odor of the unwashed people camped for days in hopes of finally boarding a train and sitting three to a seat on the rumble north. Or you could let the numbers stand alone. Picture 200,000 people. 500,000 people. 5.8 million people China-wide stranded at stations dreaming simply of doing the things that must be done at home: paying respect to the dead, distributing the minuscule wealth accumulated over a year of intense work, getting married, seeing children born that were conceived the last time one saw his wife a year ago, eating food one’s mother cooked, sleeping.

The massive snowstorms that crippled the Chinese railway network just days before the incredibly important Spring Festival took everyone by surprise. The workers, certainly, but most notably the government. Since the delayed reached a critical mass recognized by the media the army has mobilized 300,000 by some accounts, with over a million reservists also pitching in. And how could such a massively organized government be so humbled, so surprised by snow? It’s an image problem of such scale that the normally staid Premier Wen Jiabao grabbed a megaphone and traveled to the center of the country to personally apologize to his people. To judge by the column inches devoted to this gesture in local papers, this showed how seriously the government was treating this, and how the average person could have faith that everything that could be done, would be done. It’s impossible to know what effect, if any, this had on those jostling in the gray afternoon Guangzhou rain. All you have to go on are quick spot interviews from journalists on the ground, sentences plucked from hundreds of thousands of people with hundreds of thousands of opinions. You can wonder where the blame is falling, if there is a chink in the Chinese propaganda armor. I’ll choose this conversation, from a Chinese friend (not a factory laborer) who called me while I was at the station: “You hear that the Premier is going to train stations?” “Yeah.” “He’s probably very cold.” “Yeah.” “You free for dinner later?” “Sure.”

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You can export everything from here: jackets, shoes, Chinese new year ornaments, six-foot tall Santas with saxophones, plastic palm trees, beds, clocks, stuffed animals, machine parts, liquor, playing cards, basketballs, pens, mp3 players, Clinton Halloween masks, magnetic dart boards, ATVs, man shaped lamps with penis on/off switches, pants, boxes, face paints. Also, fortune cookies. There is a factory here that manufactures them for shipment to the States. Chinese people don’t eat them. They prefer watermelon.

The factories themselves, though, are both everywhere and impossible to find. An article came out not too long ago that talked about a Canadian guy with a blackberry full of phone numbers and GPS coordinates. They were all for factories, the GPS necessary because roads change so rapidly addresses are useless.

I found myself at a new construction site while searching for boats. There’s something kind of romantic, I thought, about old fashioned fishing boats floating peacefully in the lee of skyscrapers, so I set off to find one that would take me in. There’s no particular reason to think that way, I know, but purposelessness sets your mind to seek out the romantic, which in the case of China means something old, broken, and dirty. Such is my life here that “Find boat friend” was an actual item on my computer sticky note to do list. At any rate, I figured boats would be located near the water, so I took the subway out past University City and headed for the deep gray river.

The factory was across the street from the subway stop, workers scaling and poking and prodding every surface, looking like freckles on the pale exterior. Teams spackled and cemented. Teams shoveled and moved. And they all stopped to stare at the white guy moving down the dirt road, tripping on discarded cement. I plodded through until I reached the shore, where I knelt and took close-up pictures of a dog carcass seething with flies.

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The dead woman’s picture was on the mantle place beside the door. The frame was a simple, light wood, and it was topped with an elaborately tied black ribbon. I hadn’t noticed it when I first walked in and no one seemed to be paying any particular attention to the smiling face. Bright flowers stood on either side.

I shuffled in behind the florist and bowed my head as people stared at me, blinking hard against the grief and the early hour. Eyes drifted from floor to ceiling and no one said much of anything except for the florist, who pointed down into a huge black bag of ceremonial necessities. A young woman with a round face and massive eyes (the dead woman’s daughter) reached down into the bag, and drew out a long, thick cylinder – incense, to guide the spirit, and the family, on the long path to the crematorium.

But it wasn’t quite time yet, and everyone stood around looking at each other, and at the young woman with the incense. I sat on a chair next to the dead woman’s brother, whose hair piled upwards like a troupe of silvery brown acrobats. He slid across the grey pleather of the oversized armchair, but I waved him off and said he should be comfortable. He asked me why I was there, and I worried that my answer, “I was curious,” would cause anger on this sacred day. But he smiled and said that theirs was a small family but one full of love. He said that tradition had long ago faded from the life of the Chinese city dweller, but that it wouldn’t matter much anyway even if it hadn’t. He and his sister weren’t from Guangzhou originally and traditions varied so much from place to place. He said he was about as lost as I was.

Beside him, slouched on blankets of lime green and fronting a TV (shrouded, to keep away the dust) were other family members, silent and expectant in the early morning heat. The day was mercifully overcast, damping slightly the scorching humidity. But it made the city, the perpetually grey city, all the greyer, and even the extraordinary lime-ness of the lime green blankets and curtains was muted.

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