I mean, quarter past three weeks since I last posted a blog entry? Bloody hell. I can’t live like this. I think it all started when the Sony service centre blithely called and said I had lost two weeks’ worth of film documentary work. That was a media-related kick in the goolies. But can’t cry by a film grave forever, so I’ll kick bak off with my latest column. Then back to the tissue box.
This is how it started. We had dived into an upmarket restaurant because the temperature was dropping fast and it was raining; we just couldn’t bear the thought of another meal with our backs to an open door, huddled around a plastic cup of hot water. We soon got chatting to the geezers at the next table and as one of them was from Guangdong we immediately switched to Cantonese, becoming a kind of majority for a change. (Three against three.) They asked us to eat with them and soon the baijiu (Chinese rice wine) started flowing. P fought against it with all his might – it really is the vilest-tasting, most headache-inducing drink in the world – but was helpless in the face of the mighty force of Chinese Aggressive Hospitality.
One thing is asking people for a sip of wine or two, but Chinese Aggressive Hospitality decrees that there must be one ‘bottoms up!’ every 25 seconds. With the expected result.
That morning I had been on a walk and come across some leisurely swimmers on the freezing river bank. Well, not exactly freezing. They said it was 3 degrees but that was a big fat lie.
It was at least 5.
When I told P about this, a kind of madness overtook him, and he decided to play ‘Hound Dog’ (yes, electric guitar and amplifier; we’ve been busking our way through the province but more about that later) naked on that river bank and jump in afterwards. With the added bonus of a terrible baijiu hangover there was no way he could not do it, really.
He really took one for the team – well, two as I also filmed it. So you see, if he can do that, you too can learn Cantonese in 2013! AND: learning Cantonese, unlike swimming in a black and torpid river in close to zero temperatures, is completely fun, pleasurable and painless. Happy 2013, make it a Canto year!
Is it only Guangdong province that has proper youth discos? Here in Guizhou it’s all boring KTV, i.e. sitting in a small rented room by yourself or with two friends, singing karaoke and being waited on by people like the above. I counted 20 of them lined up to say welcome when we walked in to ask for directions to a bar. They gave us an address… in a different town.
Excellent hovelage. This was the only day we saw sunshine; even the tourist websites say the weather in Guizhou is ‘miserable’. They’re not wrong there.
The street food is better than in any of the crappy establishments that call themselves high-end restaurants
Apples and coal
Coal monger. It was he who insisted on me taking his photograph. I’m normally reluctant to do the close-ups as I think it’s a bit rude
Just looking at chillies makes me happy
Meat monger.
I won’t lie to you, it’s not exactly balmy. But with some wool and thermal and always comparing myself with Scott, Amundsen and Nansen, it’s a piece of cake.
It’s officially cold. Not “I’m just going outside and may be some time” cold, but “have to wear hats, scarves and gloves in a restaurant” cold. And thermal underwear.
Yesterday I went outside about 6.15AM to harden myself for what was to come, as the hotel room was unbelievably toasty and cosy and gave no indication of the Oliver Twist meets Stalingrad-like conditions downstairs.
The pavement was crawling with street food stalls catering to poor bastards having to go to work (or come from work) at 6AM. It was livelier and more food-y than at mid-day. When I say ‘lively’ I mean ‘more crowded’ – the people’s faces were closed and drawn, their heads pulled inside their jackets for warmth. Apart from the steaming food, the only sources of warmth were the odd burning coal briquets.
A stall owner told me it was 3 degrees Celsius which sounded about right – the kind of temperature which in Norway for example would be a bit nippy for July but here is raw, ugly cold coming in through the soles of your shoes, unless you, like me, are wearing fur lined boots and woolen knee length socks…
I looked at the people working outside, all day, every day, and thought I could just go upstairs to my luxurious, carpeted and not least heated room if I felt bored or cold. When I saw a woman washing her hair on the pavement in a little bowl of hot water, I thought that although I’m not rich, bugger me I’m rich.
I was saying to P just earlier today how I sometimes suspect I do the colder, more miserable of these trips just so I can appreciate more what I have.
That feeling grew as A and I climbed a little hill behind the hotel and found not only frost
but dozens and dozens of used syringes complete with blood and little empty plastic packets.
Here they had been sitting, probably at night, in zero degrees. So yeah, when all is said and done it’s better to have a few beers and go to bed in a warm room. In my opinion.
We must have stayed in the wrong part of town in that Foshan, for surely there are more interesting and less sterile parts of it than the area where our hotel, the City Inn, was. And less windy, eight-laned and horrible. As we left the hotel, they were having some kind of fascist employee pep-talk in the polar wind outside. Or some kind of communal/communism self-criticism shout-out. About 50 staff stood shivering in the light drizzle, shouting out meaningless slogans like “more harmony this minute!” “I will do better for the Party!” – stuff like that. Whatever it was, it can’t have been “I pledge to make check-out time shorter!” because as usual it took about 20 minutes to check out. One thing about mainland receptionists, they have a really hard time understanding that people who arrive together but stay in separate rooms might want to pay for their rooms separately.
Good thing about Foshan, it has an MTR system which takes you, after two changes, straight to Guangzhou train station. There we met P who came sauntering across the train station plaza with his electric guitar (complete with tiny amplifier) strapped to his back. Soon we were in the dining car having an excellent meal of fish, chicken, tofu and vegetables. And beer. Lots and lots of beer. I tried the black and white with only one colour function of my camera again, but it really doesn’t work well with humans.
The next day we arrived in Guiyang and I was catapulted back to Beijing 1988; everything quite old-fashioned and various shades of black and grey with some glorious bursts of colour:
Down by the river we came across staff from another establishment having a game of badminton
and a game of Chinese chess where rich suckers play 100 yuan a time to be taken in by charlatans while the poor look on
We wanted Sichuan food and asked two policemen outside the station where we could find some. Although taxis aren’t allowed to stop outside the railway station, the accommodating policeman arranged for a taxi to pick us up exactly at that spot, breaking all the rules if not the very law itself! What a good boy. While we were waiting, some girls came rushing up to practise their English on P. You have to hand it to these mainlanders, they have no fear when it comes to engaging the tallest stranger in town in small talk
The so-called Sichuan restaurant the taxi driver took us to turned out to be a total dud, the coldest place in town, the least Sichuan-tasting food as well as the most wildly overpriced – 88 yuan for a pot of tea, hello! We were seething. Still, it wouldn’t be Christmas if some ballroom dancers weren’t plying their trade in a hotel reception, silently, musicless-ly but with buckets of style.
Christmas in Guizhou, Christmas in the mainland. I came looking for the surreal and as usual, so far I haven’t been disappointed.
Christmas has come to the mainland as so have we. We will go where no man has gone before: Into the freezing hinterland of inner Guizhou province. But that’s this afternoon; for now we’ve only got as far as Foshan.
The epic and getting epiccer journey started with a non-bang in beautiful Zhongshan. I can’t praise that town enough. It’s just so suitable for human life with its superb hovelage, dense foliage, narrow streets and river action. There is a big park crammed with lakes, where I took the opportunity to try out a really cool thing on my camera: Black and white photos with one colour:
Which doesn’t work quite as well on humans:
That human suggested we go to Foshan to check it out, and I was all for it. I had been so wrong only months earlier about Zhongshan being a shithole, now I wanted to see and explore lovely Foshan, against which I had also been prejudiced for years.
Ah. Foshan turned out to be exactly what I had thought Zhongshan was. Eight lane roads criss-crossing the city with pedestrians forced up and down over- and underpasses, new, fascistically manicured everything, hulking high-rises casting menacing shadows over the futuristic roads and all the shops have doors. It makes Shenzhen look like a cozy village.
The disappointment made us hungry and we set out to find a Sichuan restaurant. A taxi driver would tell us where we could find a good one. But where were the taxis? After half an hour of shivering search (I was wearing a thin jumper to toughen myself up for the North but then it started to rain) we finally went to Swissotel where the receptionist told us it was Winter Solstice (not “the end of the world” as earlier reported) and all the taxi drivers were at home having dinner.
After another hour’s walk I finally spotted the first word of Sichuan Food on the other side of a gigantic building site
which the guard geezer incredibly let us walk across; walking around it would have meant another 15 minutes of suffering and he could see we were just about to cook and eat him. Chinese people understand hunger. When we finally stumbled into the place we found it closing, as the staff were of course going home to celebrate winter bloody solstice. We had to settle for Canto-slop but fortunately that kitchen had seen fit to keep some chillies at hand. A very strange meal ensued, and all was forgiven when we later discovered a place made especially for us,
a little Knutsford Terrace don’t you know, nestling between six highways. It was all closed, naturally, except the youth disco where a creepy floorshow was in full creep.
‘Scream’ meets ‘Moulin Rouge’? And this girl – I don’t know what to make of her.
Her breasts were pushed up so far they were draped around her neck, while still managing to bounce precariously around and keep their cravasse-like cleavage. But she could sing, which is the main point of these youth disco singers, as evidenced in her clothing. And so, the real journey begins. Hello train! Goodbye, comfort!
I’m posting a Christmas Extravaganza from Yules of yore, wishing everybody a beautiful, fun and meaningful Christmas.
Yesterday I saw a rather disturbing sight down at the huge dinner table of Pui O’s water buffalo, the grasslands down by Pui O Beach. Surveyors were setting up boundaries around one of my favourite vistas.
I went over and asked what they were doing, and they told me the area was to be put up for sale. The total area is this:
Who will buy it? What will it be for? One thing’s for sure, whatever they do, it won’t benefit the water buffaloes, photography or…. anyone in Pui O except the new owner. A couple I met this evening suggested going out and pulling up the boundary poles. I don’t believe in vandalism in any form, so I can’t do that. But I’ll be keeping an eye on developments. I think this, combined with the three new building sites that rumours veer wildly between “100 room hotel for mainlanders” “dormitory for China Airways employees” and, as the government finally told me after six emails “holiday camp” will be the death knell for our superb buffaloes.
I don’t think we should allow this to happen.
Like so many others of my age group, class and education level, I used to be a diehard screaming radical lefty, but in a nice way. I had a picture of Mao on my wall and thought it was really cool that the Chinese let doctors dig latrines while illiterate peasants operated on patients after only one hour of training. I supported Palestine and wore the required black and white scarf. It was what we counter-cultural people did in my youth.
Once I went to a meeting in my hometown’s faction of AKP/m-l (The Worker’s Communist Party/Marxist-Leninists) where several earnest guys with wispy beards and corduroy trousers, a little bit too short as was the ghastly fashion in 1976, droned wearily on and on about “the party line” this and “solidarity” that. When they started saying: “… and so we need armed revolution in Norway” I piped up: “What the hell for?”
The whole room looked at me as if I were a particularly nasty cockroach that had crashed the party line, and that was the end of my life as a Marxist-Leninist. Then I moved to China and began to realise what “cool” Communism was really about. I started reading books about what the nice and friendly Chinese I met had been doing only a few years earlier; killing teachers for fun and turning their own parents in to the local bullies to be ‘struggled against’ in mass meetings while the country descended into chaos all around them.
Then 9/11 happened and I began to read up on this thing called Islam which I had previously known only from 1001 Nights and it suddenly struck me how the islamic ideology is nothing but Communism only worse; at least Communism didn’t follow people into the toilet and the bedroom. (On the one occasion a month which Mao allowed his married male and female worker bees to get together to create more “stainless cogs in the Socialist machine”, that is.)
I was therefore surprised to see that my peers, now critical of Communism and its restraints on freedom and blatant disregard for human life, supported Islam in its attack on America. “They had it coming.” “They were asking for it” was what I heard from many after that awful day. It turned out that they thought (as I had many years before, I’m ashamed to admit) it was America that was the enemy and terrorist of the world, not those who openly screamed for the death of freedom while killing not only teachers but schoolgirls for fun.
I thought this very strange. We were now 40-odd years old and they still held on to the thoughts they, well, we, had had when we were 16?
I started reading voraciously books by former Muslims as well as discovering through the blessed medium of the internet people I could relate to, such as David Horowitz, Jamie Glazov, Glenn Beck, Erick Stackelbeck and a slew of others too numerous to mention. I discovered with a thud: That I’m a libertarian conservative and that this is now the new counter-culture!
Why, all the people who were so revolutionary in my youth are now comfortably mainstream; their views, unchanged since 1976, are now the only accepted views in the entire western culture and I’m being seen as a fascist racist Nazi far right-wing nutjob! Yes, it was Facebook that alerted me to this startling notion.
After I started posting my views on my blog and thence on Facebook, several well-meaning friends have ‘taken me aside’ by sending me personal messages on Facebook, rather than having an honest debate in public. They always start out by assuring me how much they like me and my love of dogs and China, but couldn’t I just stick to Tibet and the Hong Kong government in my postings? Don’t I realise that by “spewing hatred” against Islam, I will “become more extreme than the extremists”?
After mad murderer Breivik killed all those people in Norway last year, it became that I was “worse than Breivik”, and couldn’t we all just get along? Yes, posting pictures of Muslim women with their faces melted off by some acid-throwing husband clearly makes me worse than a guy shooting teenagers in the face.
Ah, Facebook. I suppose I should count myself lucky that only two of my real friends have unfriended me so far. The first one was a woman whom I know very well. She has been to my house several times and we have partied together on numerous occasion. Her cut-off point was when she posted on Facebook environmentally “There are just too many people in the world! We need to get rid of a lot of people.” When I, quite reasonably I thought, asked her who she had in mind, she cut me off, going on to explain in a personal message that she’d had enough of my “hatred” and I was a completely different person in my writings than the “warm and friendly woman” she had personally liked.
So the party line was stronger than her own lying senses.
There is only one thing stranger than women; feminists, even, supporting Islam and that is gay guys supporting Islam.
The second personal friend who unfriended me on Facebook is a gay guy. He had long been irritated about what I wrote about people who openly say they will hang him from a crane or push him from a height if he as much as shows his face in their country. In his email, more or less identical in wording to all the other friendly or threatening messages I have received after I came out as an anti-authoritorian-ideology person, he ended with:
“What is completely unnaceptable is when a post becomes racist – when I posted about the Malaysian government issuing guidance to teachers so that they could spot gay children, your response was “Why not just say it – they’re muslims” – that is just blatant racism. How would you have felt if, on one of your posts about Breivik, someone had posted “Why not just say it – he’s Norwegian”? Your post was insulting to millions of people. I have no truck with racism whatsoever under any circumstances and for that reason I blocked you and unfriended you. I also deleted your post as I did not want to be associated with racist comments in any form.”
So he, an English gay guy, stands firmly with the people who are now, under an increasingly Islamist government, training to “spot” gay children. Never mind what they will do with them once they are spotted. But you know what, gay guy, I wouldn’t feel a second of hurt if someone said Breivik is Norwegian. He is Norwegian, and so am I. And that’s all we have in common.
My former peers of the communist/socialist/anti-Israel/anti-USA/pro-Palestine persuasion, however, have so many things in common with the new Communist on the block, Islam. One of them is that they want to control what other people think and write.
Bye, former friends. No great loss.
