The Chengdu - Lhasa Express. The highest train in the world.

“So where can I get Panda to eat?”
After the initial shock leaves his face, Tony manages to stammer,
“You..you…you cant eat Panda…it’s illegal.”
He looks to the middle aged chinese couple for support and the man, James, nods sternly. Which is odd, really, because he doesn’t speak a word of English. Tony translates for him and now James nods even more sternly, then smiles and says something. Tony translates for me,
“Uncle says when he was in Australia, he asked if you can eat Koala. The guide told him that it was illegal…but maybe if one fell out of a tree and was already dead, you could probably eat it. So uncle says if you wait in the forest for long enough, you could probably have some Panda.”
As he finishes translating Tony looks confused again.
“Why do you want to eat Panda?”
“Well, I heard the Chinese people will eat anything and I thought a Panda would be interesting meat. Especially a baby one, they’d have to be sooooo tender.”
Tony doesn’t know what to make of that, but I finish with a huge smile and an evil giggle.
“I don’t think you really want to eat Panda”, Tony says quietly to himself.

Northern Sichuan Province

Chinese Killer Robots. Okay, so it's more a scarecrow, but the title sounds heaps better

Tony

So Tony is a Chengdu boy and a middle aged couple from Fujian province are my other companions in this four berth train cabin. James is not really Tony’s uncle, it’s just how chinese people refer to any unrelated older man. So the four of us are taking a little holiday trip into Tibet and have been travelling north from Chengdu for over twenty hours and we’re just turning west to go through Xining and into Tibet. There’s more than twenty hours to go before we arrive in Lhasa, so we spend our time chatting and watching the scenery change. Tony is studying international business, so talking to me is great experience for him in hearing a native English speaker. It’s also awesome for me, since just about nobody on the train speaks any English.

Uncle and Auntie

The middle aged couple are like a curious postcard of a clean cut model chinese relationship. She believes fervently whatever her husband says and concentrates on looking nice for him twenty-four hours a day. Which isn’t hard, because she is rather beautiful. He likes to sit and drink fermented green tea twenty four hours a day, inbetween pronouncing his wisdom in short bursts. What’s really interesting about him is that his normal job is to lead a team of chinese narcotic police. Organising raids, tracking organized crime groups, all the fun stuff. He’s clearly used to being in control and has the forceful personality and presence you’d expect. Which may also explain why lunch and dinner for all of us arrives courtesy of the head of the train’s security staff. Nice job perk I suppose. Tony tells me everyone in the wagon knows what James’ job is, which is why they’re all well behaved and deferential when they pass the door.

As we arrive at Xining I race out onto the platform and grab some cold beer from a small shop. There’s no cold beer on the train at all. They have no fridges on board. The dining car picks up fresh food along the way, so they don’t need them. Sitting back in the cabin with my haul I ask Tony how big Xining is. He consults ‘uncle’ James who advises it’s just a small town. No more than six million people in it. Right, so it’s the same size as Sydney and its just a small town. I suppose getting 1.3 Billion people into one country does require a lot of ‘small towns’ like this one.

Xining - Golmud

Xining - Golmud. The pattern near the train is to stop erosion from displacing the tracks.

After the forests and mountain passes of northern Sichuan, the ground is starting to flatten out and the plateau extends into the distance. It ends only with the mountain range to our south that forms the natural border of Tibet. At the height of its power, the country of Tibet included the provinces I’m now rolling through, but now the tide has turned the other way and now all of this is western China. The road runs parallel to the train tracks and I’m amazed to see vast convoys of what look like army trucks making their way into Tibet. James tells me they’re just normal trucks bringing supplies. It’s not that I’d dare to disbelief ‘uncle’, but I’ve seen freight trucks all over China now and they look nothing like these ones. Lake Qinghai appears to the south and we pass by it for a very long time. It is the largest lake in China after all.

Hot Qinghai action

It’s only after we pass through Golmud that we really start gaining altitude. We climbed over a kilometre between Chengdu and Xining, but only climbed a few hundred metres since then. There’s another two kilometers to be climbed before we get to the Danggula pass; At 5,027 metres above sea level, it is the highest railway pass in the world. Which is why I feel obliged to leap out of the train at the station and do some star jumps on the platform. This first has the attention of my cabin friends, but soon fifty chinese tourists sitting in their cabins are taking pictures of this huge westerner flouting the laws of altitude sickness.

Dont..You...Fuckin...Look...At....Me .... or for those who haven't seen Blue Velvet, there be Oxygen

Uncle says it's not a military convoy heading into Tibet

My cabin mates turned on all the oxygen valves in our cabin that night while I was asleep. There is one above each bed and as soon as I realize what the noise is, I turn mine off. At six o’clock the next morning we began our ascent into Tibet itself. I try to explain to Tony that using the oxygen will not let your body adjust to the thin air. The more you use it, the less happy you will be in Tibet. Of course, this didn’t matter because ‘uncle’ James disagreed with me. So I could have produced scientific reports or even had a professional climber with me to explain until the cows came home. It would make no difference because uncle is always right. This does push me to go and do star jumps at Danggula; just to demonstrate how easy it is. As it was, I was left fairly breathless quite quickly, but a short walk along the platform calmed me enough to happily get back on the train. They immediately offer me the oxygen tube attached to the wall above my bed. I refuse it, unplug it and put it away in my baggage as a souvenir. I’m determined to handle Tibet on even terms and the thought of being attached to an oxygen cylinder the whole time is unattractive.

Tibet!

Tibet!

If you see something like this, you may be in Tibet

Lhasa train station

As we arrive in Lhasa train station we bid our fond farewells, wishing each other good luck for our journeys. I wander around for a while until I see a tall chinese man holding a card with my name on it. I introduce myself and he places a white silk scarf, a Khata, around my neck and bids me welcome to Tibet. I stand for a moment, looking to the blue sky and the mountains around me, feeling a light, cool breeze wash across my body. But the only thing I can think is that only a Tibetan can welcome you to their country. He bundles me into a taxi and we head for the hotel, where he tells me that Nicola, the English girl who will be a part of the Tibetan tour for the next week or so, has already arrived and I can meet her straight away.

I stash my bags in my room and the only thing I can think of is having a beer on the roof of the hotel. I stop off to meet Nicola; a happy, young English girl out to discover the world. I tell her I’m going to the roof to have a beer and check out the view and she thinks I’m crazy to think about having a beer. All the guidebooks advise abstinence from alcohol and cigarettes when at high altitude. Apparently they lessen the body’s ability to handle the stresses of low pressure oxygen supply and altitude sickness can lead to serious complications. Dizziness, nausea, coughing, headaches, confusion, bladder dysfunction and death are all a part of the fun. If you remain at altitude when the symptoms begin to get serious, the chances are that you will die. I have no intention of leaving Tibet one second before it becomes a legal necessity, so I’m determined to push through whatever the experience will bring me.

So I’m sitting on the roof of the hotel, watching an astonishingly stunning sunset as I sip my beer and savour my cigarette. Between beers I wander around the rooftop, taking pictures in every direction and chatting to Nicola along the way. I feel like I’m seeing something truly special, there is a curious feeling about this city and I keep staring at Potala Palace – the old home of the Dalai Lama. As the sky changes colours again and again, I feel a love for Tibet pouring into me from all sides. The sky slowly darkens on the roof of the world and I begin to feel incredibly happy.

Lhasa Beer! - Best in China...

Lhasa

Lhasa Sunset with Hot Rainbow Action

Lhasa Sunset - Does that mountain have a halo?

Lhasa Sunset, Potala Palace with some sunburned Australian idiot

Lhasa Sunset

I turn to Nicola and say,
“You know, before I got here, I was really worried about spending so much money on this trip. Now I’m here, just seeing this, just experiencing this…..I…..I….just cant care about money anymore.”
She looks thoughtful for a while, slowly scanning her eyes along the mountains that surround us on all sides.
“I think I know what you mean. If I had to leave now, I don’t think I’d be that upset.”
“Yup, that’s it. You’d be content. But the fact we’re about to spend the next week or so travelling around this country is making me feel incredibly happy with my life.”
I feel like taking the whole world in my arms and giving it a huge bear hug to share the feeling, but I settle for another beer and a smoke as night settles on Lhasa.

Potala Palace - The Dalai Lama's Spirtual Home

Calm monkey action.

I suppose you’re wondering where I got the picture of the monkey at the top of the page there.  More to the point, the more dedicated observer would notice there are three monkeys that change places each time you come to this website to read stories.  Well, the truth is they are the prototype for the flying robot monkeys that I will use to take over the world when my orbiting battlestations are complete.  Nature made these ones, but they are part of the blueprint for my campaign to establish myself as world dictator with my penguins by my side.  Okay, so that might not be an entirely accurate explanation of why I chose those pictures.  I just wanted to remind you all that when you see the flying robot monkeys descend from the skies wreaking havoc and sweeping all resistance before them like autumn leaves; just say ‘Oh Hi Dhugal’ and they’ll leave you alone.  They may dance a little for you first, or offer you a beer, because that’s how they’ll be programmed; but they will spare your lives.

In any case, these pictures are of one monkey that I found sitting at the very top of Emei Shan in Sichuan province, China.  This mountain has been a site of spiritual meditation for religious types for at least a couple of thousand years.  Once you walk along the paths away from the spots filled with Chinese tourists, you will understand why.  The place has a feeling of natural beauty, peace and wonder that makes you feel like profound revelation is a moment away.

Walking along the middle level pathways of the mountain, I’d left the tourist hordes behind an hour ago when I drift into an almost magical place.  I approached it along a narrow pathway winding along the side of a river valley covered in lush vegetation and sheltered by tall, spreading tree canopies.  The river water burbles and rushes by my side; it travels downhill as I climb my mountain.  I come around a corner, where the valley pushes a little deeper into the river’s path, and discover a waterfall.  The sun shines gently off the smooth cascade and leads me to notice the bridge crossing over the top of the waterfall.  It is a Chinese canopied bridge with a temple style roof atop wooden pillars and wooden bench seats along both sides of it.  When I arrive in the bridge’s shelter and look down the valley, watching the river turn the corner I had just come around, I know I have to stay here a while.  I sit on the bench seat with my back to the way I had come, looking instead at the narrow trickle of water coming down the mountainside and flowing under the bridge on which I sit.  Thick undergrowth clamours at the edges of stream flowing down the hill.  If my past is behind me, then the future is hidden at the top of the mountain and obscured by forest.

The River Valley

I sit on the wooden bench and lose myself in the absence of thought.  Time evaporates like dew off the leaves of the ferns that surround me.
A rock in the sunlight.
A reflection of a leaf in the water.
The shadow of a tree on the riverbank.
Brown wooden bench with scratches of age and use.
Faded paint.
A breeze gently brushes the smallest weed as it pushes the largest tree.
A body breathes, I am somewhere else.

I feel like I’m on the edge of epiphany.  Maybe I’ve already been past the edge and I’m just trying to attach words to the feeling.  There’s nothing in my heart and mind but the kind of harmonious peace that people would pay a fortune to possess.  I feel myself returning to the world of time and place and send an SMS to a friend in Melbourne saying what just happened and the feeling of being on the edge of epiphany continues.  He replies with his normal simple wisdom.
“That’s why they built it there.’

Returning along the valley...

Looking at my phone tells me I’ve just lost the best part of an hour sitting here, I consider staying longer, to return to that state, but I know the evening will bring an intense cold that I don’t want to be caught in.  As I’m walking back to the pathway I wonder why I’m placing temporary personal comfort higher than that feeling of absolute, timeless peace.  I also begin to feel hungry and can picture a plate of spicy Sichuan style pork with steamed rice and a cold beer.  It still takes a couple of hours to get to the bus that will take me back down to the town at the base of the mountain where I’m staying.  When I finally get back to eat and drink, I feel another kind of contented peace settle over me that lasts until I fall into bed to rest.

Just before I sleep, I’m thinking about that feeling of epiphany again.  Like you’ve just experienced the kind of understanding or realisation that makes people start religions, conquer empires and generally change the way the rest of humanity sees itself – once its been explained.  And explaining the nature of epiphany is as supremely difficult as explaining the epiphany itself.
“I just saw the face of God and now I see what we all must do”, sounds just as crazy to me as,
“Everybody is basically layers of paper and I just need to peel them off to find the truth.”
Both are the kinds of things proper schizophrenics are likely to say and the more active will put them into action; starting a cult or a series of attacks on individuals trying to remove their skin.  Epiphany can be dangerously crazy as much as it can represent the ultimate enlightenment.

Epiphany is for monkeys too...

The next morning I travel to the very top of the mountain.  This time I cheat and take a bus for an hour that takes me up most of the way.  Then I swap to the cable car for the last jaunt to the Golden Summit.  My legs are aching sacks of meat.  On the bus ride I figure out I walked between ten and fifteen kilometres; not so bad.  What’s killed me is that also involved half a kilometre of altitude change.  At one point I walked down sets of stairs that dropped me three hundred metres over just one kilometre.  The pain in my calf muscles is exquisite today.  I then begin to wonder how much that had to do with that moment on the bridge and the second calmness of feeling full, warm and sleepy. Was my body just full of endorphins from the hefty and painful exercise?  A drug like any other, but produced internally for our own pleasure when the body is dealing with things that are hurting it.  It’s also this drug that gets released at the point of orgazm; so we turn pain to pleasure and pleasure to …well, orgazm.

So the reason I’ve come to the top of the mountain today is to try to experience at least one of the ‘Four Wonders of Emei Shan’.  So after the two hour journey to the top of the mountain, I’m greeted by a thick fog, through which you can barely see ten metres ahead.  I keep telling myself its still early morning, only just after eight now, and the fog will pass to reveal the wonders.  It doesn’t, so you can read about the four wonders somewhere else, I never saw them.  Now a foul mood begins to descend on me.  I’ve travelled all the way from Australia, woken up at some unheard of hour of the morning to scale this mountain and it doesn’t even have the decency to unhook its dress and show me some wonders.  I stalk around in the fog and mist taking pictures of whatever I can, planning to leave as soon as possible.

I send a heap of messages to friends asking them to help me convince the world to give me some clear skies so I can at least see a cloud sea from up here; something I’ve always wanted to experience.  I have some fun exchanging messages with a few people and wait for an hour or so to see if things will improve.  They don’t and I stalk back down the mountain wondering where else I can go to find a cloud sea.  I discover the path back to the cable car is different to the one I took from it and naturally leads through half a kilometre of fucking souvenir shops.  I am at a top Chinese tourist destination and I really should have expected this.  After the disappointment of not finding a cloud sea, this is like rubbing in the salt and I feel my mood move from foul to venomous.  Now I want to spread this poison to someone else and I start looking for targets.

I’m busy looking for an over enthusiastic shop owner whose time I can waste for half an hour pretending I’m going to buy something really big.  This means he’ll miss any real opportunities from the morning crowd and I will walk away at the end feeling happier; with the poison shifted from my fangs.  Then I notice a bunch of Chinese tourists lining up to have their photos taken with the local monkeys; macaques that have lived here forever.  They buy food in little paper bags and give it to the monkeys to distract them.  Then they stand next to the monkey in small groups with their two fingers in the air to take the standard Chinese picture.  I start thinking of a way I can fuck with this tourist horror story of profoundly unhealthy monkeys being exploited by….

In a moment the whole scene changes.  The poison evaporates from me in a few moments, leaving a mellow cloud in its wake.

Through the valley behind the monkeys is a magnificent cloud sea leading off into the distance.  The sea later joins to the clouds forming a strange juxtaposition and confusion of what is land, sea and sky.  My feelings are unravelled and my mind bends awkwardly.  How could I be so upset over nothing?  That mood could have easily made me miss this natural wonder.  Why was I so consumed by it so quickly?  Especially after the wondrous glory of yesterday.

There, perched on a smooth stone, is one of the monkeys with his back to the tourist crowd.  He’s just staring out across the valley, oblivious to what’s going on around him.  I manage to catch a picture of him before a Chinese family start yelling at him and throwing nuts to get his attention.  It takes a while for him to notice them anyway.  Then he turns half way around and slowly looks at them, then looks back across the valley.  I catch him in a second picture.  Finally they land some nuts on the stone next to him and he picks them up and starts eating them.  I take the third picture.

Monkey nuts taste best

Yesterday I was feeling absolute peace and got distracted by my comfort zone calling me.  Today I feel I’m watching a macaque having the same experience.  Can this be true?  Am I such a little monkey to be so easily turned and driven by my comfort zone?  Does the monkey even understand the beauty of the cloud sea?  Is it just sitting there staring into space with no thought in its head at all?  Has this monkey actually achieved a kind of enlightenment?  Is the real trick to enlightenment managing to calm and harmonise the many different comfort zones a human mind drives us to?  What is the lesson of the monkey?

I look at the pictures again and notice that the monkey isn’t looking at the cloud sea at all.  He’s so close to looking at it, but does not see it.  I want to turn his head to show him, I want to know if he’s even capable of seeing it, I want to make him be able to see it.  Why do I want this monkey to see the cloud sea?  I dont know anymore.  It’s like I want him to see what I see, then be able to talk to him to see if he feels what I feel.  Does he feel like the world just got torn apart and put back together in a new way?  Could he ever understand that?  Could another human even understand that?  Now we’ve got to the centre of it.  The monkey is so close to looking at it, but he does not see it.  He does not know to turn his head that one extra degree to see it.  He needs something else to make him turn his head that one extra degree, some other external force has to make him move.

I’m frozen in my spot now, paralyzed by endless waves of thought; introspection and consideration.  The Chinese tourists arrive and leave in groups, feeding the monkey for the photo opportunity and then leaving without a thought.  There is an idea that humans aren’t born with souls, that a soul can only be grown through the process of self-exploration and self-realisation.  The reason most people never develop a soul is that they are so continually distracted by everyday life, by their comfort zones, that the opportunity for that self-realisation never arises.

Are these the soulless masses that surround me now?  They surge in crowds, herded by tour guides and stop only at the official places for photo opportunities.  Those spots also feature people selling food, drink and random other junk.  The only difference between this place and a Chinese city street is there’s less buildings and a much better view.  I feel like I want to throw the shops over the side of the mountain and yell at the people to think about the monkey.

The idea of this huge foreigner trashing the markets and yelling incoherently in English about watching the monkey brings a strange smile to my face.  Then I see it, know it, feel it absolutely.  The Four Wonders of Emei Shan are just lures to bring you to this place.  The cloud sea is one of them and is truly amazing.  They are, however, the distractions as surely as the peanuts are distracting this monkey.  What’s important isn’t the place, the people or the time.  It’s that feeling.  Being on the edge of epiphany, not because you’re waiting to cross over; but because you’ve just returned.

So the next installment is to talk about the Chinese family and work ethics and then the difference between China, Hong Kong and Taiwan in these troubled modern times.  These answers can all be summarized fairly quickly, so here goes.  You must listen to and look after your family at all costs.  This especially means you must add your own children to the family.   Secondly, you must be at work for as long as feasibly possible on any given day.  If you can be there longer than that, then you should.   Next, Hong Kong is an outpost of English Chinese people and Taiwan is an outpost of American Chinese people.  Allow me to go into this a bit more to put all of this into some context for you.

The Chinese work ethic is famous worldwide already; falling fairly under the ‘good fortune’ philosophical mainstay.  Seeing some particulars on how it works in the homeland was quite interesting, everyone really wants an office job, but its not anything to do with the work.  It really doesn’t matter.  The competition in the office job is who can sit at their desk longest on a daily basis.  You could be doing nothing at all, surfing the web, sorting the same paperwork a thousand times, it also doesn’t matter.  You just have to be there and be seen to be there longer than everyone else.  Since the idea of a true meritocracy flies in the face of the guanxi principle we’ve already seen, I can tell you which is in active operation; guanxi wins every time.  So if you get noticed for always being at work, you become a ‘good worker’, if someone higher up labels you so, then your guanxi status improves.  Everyone else wants to know you and hopes for the same labeling, so they can increase their guanxi stakeholding.

The idea of individuals actually doing the best job in the shortest time simply never occurs to anyone.  Why would you do that?  Many people are paid by the hour, so why finish work quickly?  Even when you’re on a salary, promotions are a hundred times more likely to come from guanxi connections than actual talent; so again, why bother?  The thing you want to spend your time doing is cultivating your guanxi connections in any way you can.  The first way to do that is by hanging around at work longer than anyone and trying to get noticed for doing it. Managing to do favours for people in higher positions is pure gold, your real aim at work is guanxi status, not actual work.

So is guanxi another name for corruption?  Well, yes, in many ways it is.  This is a huge mechanism for corruption and nepotism, hard cash is the other most common means to achieving your ends.  However, since your average chinese citizen simply doesn’t have that much hard cash, guanxi is easily more common.  I remember reading a fascinating story in a chinese news publication that kind of ties a lot of these ideas together.  So the first thing you need to know is that technically prostitution and brothels are illegal in China.  So when a medium ranking public servant walks out of a brothel into the arms of two undercover police officers, an interesting situation occurs.  They agree to let him go if he pays a ‘fine’ (bribe) of 5000 kuai (just over AUD$900).  He manages to bargain the ‘fine’ down to 2300 kuai; demonstrating the chinese bargaining instinct hard at work.  He then calls a friend of his who has the money to come and bail him out.  The friend arrives and after some further confrontation, it turns out the ‘police officers’ are just a pair of guys trying to make some quick cash.  There’s a scuffle and everyone separates with no money changing hands.  The friend turns out to work for the police and quickly recognised the criminals.  In all of that we see corruption working at a couple of levels, firstly everyone knows its illegal to visit prostitutes, but its very common to do so.  The criminals recognise this as nobody wants to be officially punished for visiting a prostitute and will pay moeny or favours to escape it.  If you are officially punished you lose a lot of your personal face and guanxi as well – people dont want to be associated with a criminal.  He uses his own guanxi to escape punishment, firstly with money and secondly with his connection to a police officer.  Either way he knows he’s safe from real punishment.

So by this time you’re probably thinking how damn backwards they are for still behaving like this.  You’d be wrong.  The overall behaviour is largely identical to corporate behaviour worldwide.  Anyone who’s worked for a multinational, or just a very large company, should recognize everything I just described.  Playing golf with the boss, cultivating a group of influential friends you have coffee, lunch or beers with or just flirting with all the boss’s secretaries to get better access to the decision makers.  So what am I saying?  That the Chinese people operate on a cultural basis like one enormous corporate entity? Yup.  Some people from every country work this way, here it forms the basis of shared understanding of life for everyone.  Guanxi makes life a corporate challenge.

So even people who don’t work in an office environment follow the rules.  From street hawkers to builders, bus drivers to tourist site workers, life follows the same pattern.  Everyone understands it and follows it relentlessly. In fact, following the plan particularly relentlessly will earn you respect and further guanxi.  So what is the plan exactly?  You have to take every opportunity afforded you by your family to apply the principles of good fortune and good health to yourself and your children.  Family is still king, the family unit is extensive and normally strong, but is a changing form in the aftermath of the single child policy.  Instead of also competing with a host of brothers and sisters for family favours, it’s very common for the only child to have been endowed with anything that the family could provide.  This will be the best education they can afford, connections with the best other families that they know for marriage partners and all the support they can give.

The pressure to be married and raising children is still enormous and only grows with age.  To be unmarried at the age of thirty is considered a family tragedy, doubly so if you’re a woman.  The curious thing is I met quite a few unmarried people in their mid to late twenties who had no particular plans on marriage or children for years.  The problem for the family is this child knows they are the only way the family can continue, so they can do as they damn well please.  This is one facet of what I hear they call ‘little emperor syndrome’.  The second facet is about the status of women in society.  Since most families preferred to have boys as their only child (and would do pretty well anything to ensure this), the result is that today there are too many men in the community competing for the attention of the women.  The women know this and have high requirements for any potential partner.  Good job, good family, good fortune, good health.  So the system is driven even harder for men now.

Now all of those comments about family and the single child policy only apply strongly to the city dwellers.  These are the people who have a higher chance for receiving a good education and the opportunity to find jobs that pay well.  The country Chinese people have a different fate.  Apparently the single child policy wasn’t enforced so strenuously out there, so many of the old rules still apply.  The difference between country and city dwellers is one of money and opportunity, which explains why urbanization is happening at an incredible rate.  I, however, spent little time talking to people from these regions, since I can’t speak Chinese.  The vast majority of locals I met and spoke with were from the privileged educated middle classes, so you should take that into account with everything I’m saying.

So back to the question of Hong Kong and Taiwanese culture.  In Hong Kong most people have British English accents and a largely English outlook on the world that is layered over the first two parts of this series of posting.  They’re cynical, very aware of the global community and constantly operating with the knowledge that the existence of Hong Kong as a financial giant is limited.  After I’d being in Shanghai, which feels like a young man just turning twenty, filled with energy and opportunity; Hong Kong feels like a middle aged man.  The pace is slower, but more refined.  The Chinese government has signed the death warrant with the phenomenal development of Shanghai as the new financial heartland of the Eastern world.  Whether you think it is now, or will be in ten or twenty years, we can all see the inevitability of it.  So what’s the point of keeping a hold of Hong Kong?  My main suspicion is the Chinese government have used Hong Kong as a living experiment to learn from.  They’ve learned about global business, global trading and how to make the whole thing work from an office in the middle of south east asia.  They’ve learned first hand how the British were making the place so astonishingly successful.  Now they’re finishing the learning phase and heavily applying it to Shanghai.  Been nice knowing you Hong Kong.

I was informed by a few people that I might have trouble getting work teaching English in Taiwan.  The problem is my accent is all wrong.  Not American enough.  Perhaps if I worked on sounding more American I’d have a chance.  In mainland china the requirement to teach English is to have white skin.  This means that vast majority of English teachers I met in China were not native speakers, rather Europeans enjoying a working holiday.  In any case, Taiwan’s status as an American outpost is everywhere.  Hallowe’en and thanksgiving are well known, Christmas is celebrated in exactly the same frenzy of commercialized bollocks.  The Americans aimed to have buffer states around China and all I can say is ‘mission successful’.  This isn’t to say that I don’t like the Taiwanese people, on the contrary, they’re my favourite Chinese subculture.  They don’t have the naivety of the mainland Chinese when it comes to believing the media and they don’t have the intensity of the pursuit of money that I found in Hong Kong.

They are very globally aware and a lot more relaxed than the mainlanders.  The pace of life just doesn’t have the frenetic desperation of the permanent pursuit of good fortune.  The quality of life is good and they know it.    They’re very familiar with foreigners visiting the country, especially Americans, so foreigners hold no special status.  In mainland China there were many times when I’d be stared at in curious amazement by older people.  Chinese mainland women who could speak English would make a point of talking to me almost anywhere.  Many Chinese women want a foreign husband, mostly ‘good fortune’, but white skin is a huge requirement – its considered very attractive.  However, in Taiwan, you’re just another person.

One of the most consistent conversations that came up while I was in the country was how long it would be before they reunified with mainland China.  Estimates ranged from five years to twenty five years.  I think ten to fifteen years is the mark.  There’s some hints the government is moving that way, they’re starting to change the English versions on signs everywhere to use only pinyin – the mainland standard.  They’re also looking to shift to using the simplified Chinese characters the mainland adopted some time ago.  Things that used to be a sign of Taiwanese independence are now slipping away as an impediment to progress.  A couple of people commented they’re really waiting for the older generation to die or relinquish their jobs and influence.  Once mainland China’s feet are firmly planted as the economic heartland, the Taiwanese people will follow the call.  After all, at the end of the day, it’s a move for good fortune.

Since before the mighty Qin emperor united China into one nation for the first time, the people have quested to find one thing above all others from the natural world; the secret to immortality.  Qin Shi Huangdi himself is likely to have died from eating mercury tablets given to him as immortality pills.  The stories, legends and myths in Chinese culture that centre around Taoists who attain immortality are almost numberless.  It’s a strong drive that lives on today in the second answer to any question; it’s for good health.  Good health means long life and the longest life is immortality – which you should be striving for in every waking moment that you aren’t striving for good fortune.

This brings me inevitably to the topic of Chinese food – the heartland of the ‘good health’ culture.  In general mainland Chinese food has a few common characteristics.  Firstly it is incredibly oily.  Seriously, every Chinese recipe starts with this instruction,
“Half fill a pot with oil so you have somewhere to cook everything.”
I had Chinese people telling me that a dish wasn’t that oily, or wasn’t oily at all.  This meant that there was one tablespoon of oil to every three tablespoons of actual food, rather than the one to two ratio they prefer.  Don’t even bother trying to explain how incredibly unhealthy that much oil is in your diet.  The chinese people say it’s great for ‘good health’ and you and the food scientists are NOT an authority.

Secondly ingredients are given the minimum preparation possible.  You take fresh stuff, maybe cut some of it up, probably leave most of it whole and throw it in the oil bath.  If you’re making Szechuan food, you chuck in the peppercorns and chilli.  Otherwise it’s a mix of simple sauces and probably cornflour to make it thick and slimy.  Now the fresh ingredients part really is good and it’s taken very seriously.  If vegetables don’t have the right texture associated with freshness, they will stop eating it and never return to the restaurant.  If it isn’t fresh, it isn’t a part of ‘good health’.  The fact it’s covered in enough oil to clog the arteries of a rhinoceros is apparently irrelevant.

While we’re talking about texture, that is a general point about all Chinese food – the texture is as, or more, important than flavour or taste.  There are particular textures the Chinese palate craves; crunchy fresh for vegetables, crispy chew for animal skin and super smooth and soft for everything else.  That’s why the cornflour gets into so many sauces, it makes the sauce smooth and soft, instead of watery.  Chinese desserts are an experience in weird mouth sensations for westerners.  Quite a few felt like I was chewing giant maggots.  They had exactly the softness and smoothness you would expect if you ate a maggot.  Not the best image for food, but don’t ever forget, all of that isn’t a matter of cultural taste, it’s for good health.

Thirdly, all food should be washed down with hot drinks, preferably tea.  This is half the reason that you often can’t find a cold drink in a small restaurant or shop.  Especially beer.  Only crazy westerners ask for cold drinks.  It’s good health to drink warm or hot drinks, you must be crazy to drink cold drinks – you will definitely shorten your life.  Frankly, warm beer already shortens my life.  Now considering the amount of oil in the food, drinking hot tea with it actually makes sense.  The oil floats above the food itself and doesn’t get a chance to form into a single lump that could probably choke your intestines for weeks.  Now if you ask anyone about any part of this, the answer you are most likely to receive is, ‘it’s for good health’.  I hope it’s starting to drive you as crazy as it drove me.

I remember sitting in a restaurant being lectured by a middle-aged Chinese man on good health.  This was one of many times the topic came up, but this time illustrates the culture best.  He thought I should be drinking hot tea instead of cold beer and that I should eat less meat – because meat makes you put on weight.  I should also eat sunflower seeds and nuts all day long before eating as much rice as I wanted.  All of this was delivered whilst he chain smoked his way through half a packet of cigarettes, with smoke drawn through shattered teeth and bleeding gums.  This was occasionally washed away as he emptied another glass of baijiu (Chinese sake) that was poured for him at his table.  Naturally I tried to explain that carbohydrates have twice the calories by weight of protein and protein actually makes you feel full, so you eat less.  Beer has a fraction of the alcohol of white spirits, especially the vile baijiu that routinely was of very low quality – I’m amazed people can see or walk after drinking much of it.  That and he was doing more bad to himself with the cigarettes than anything I was doing put together.  I was basically told to shut up, because I was younger and hence wrong.  If I listened to him, I would enjoy good health into my old age.  I looked into that destroyed mouth one last time and vowed to ignore advice from manky old Chinese men.

I was surprised and a little disappointed to see advertisements on Chinese television for products that have been banned in Australia, England, North America and Europe for twenty years.  This included weight loss or long life tea, slimming magnets and any number of things that were guaranteed to give you good health and long life – but not much more.  Just profits for the company selling it really.  False advertising legislation seems to be absent from Chinese law – or the advertisers have enough guanxi with the government to render it pointless.  It seems Chinese marketers have long understood the people’s weakness for anything labelled with ‘good health’ and aren’t afraid to prey on it.

You’ll see people walking down a pathway in a park clapping their hands above their heads.  You’ll watch them eat foul tasting ingredients with a grimace on their face.  You’ll see them choose one side of the street to walk down or some kind of car to drive.  All in the name of ‘good health’.  I developed theory on this that says if you want to sell something or mess with the Chinese people all you need to do is find someone with a lot of guanxi and get them to spread the word.  You could start a trend, sell a product or just have fun and nobody would question it for a moment.  They’d wear one red sock on their left hand if someone in a position of authority said it would bring good health or good fortune – and did it as an example.

That culture of being forced to listen to and obey people in higher social positions creates this crazy dichotomy of a ‘good health’ culture tainted with incredibly unhealthy habits.  It was with some delight I noted that the current generation of twenty-somethings seems happier to ignore their ancestors and look to science for real answers.  When they’re in front of their elders, they generally conform, the moment they’re away, they make their own choices.  There’s nothing wrong with a culture of good health, just make sure what you’re doing really is healthy.   That way you avoid swallowing immortality pills and dying of mercury poisoning like old Qin Shi Huangdi.

So a number of people have asked me about what the Chinese people are like and later asked what’s the difference between people from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.  So I’m going to write a few entries now to give my definitive answer after long hours of consideration.  It can, however, be condensed into one sentence: They’re all fucking crazy, but in an interesting way I kinda respect.  So first here’s a summary of the character of the average mainlander.  Of course this is a generalisation, but you’d be surprised how well generalisations actually work here.

When asked why they are doing anything at all, there are three standard answers you will receive 99% of the time.  These activities can range from eating chicken feet, lighting incense in a Buddhist temple, carrying a live pig on a motorcycle or drinking three litres of tea every day.  These answers are (in order of greatest usage):
1.    Good fortune
2.    Good health
3.    I don’t know
It never ceased to amaze me how much the first two answers govern the vast majority of daily behaviour.  They seem to form the common basis of all shared understanding between the Chinese people.  If you cannot track back everything you do for every moment of your life (including sleeping time) to one of those two things; then you are weird.  For example, every time I explained that I had quit my very well paying job to go travelling for an indeterminate length of time with no particular goal in mind apart from increasing my life experience; they would pull a very baffled expression.  The idea of leaving any work is simply unthinkable.  The idea of leaving such good work is beyond rational comprehension.  Okay, so people back in Australia also may not entirely understand the decision, but it’s not that unfamiliar.  The dream of leaving work and doing something else is such a common one, that incomprehension is more normally replaced with jealousy.

So now we’ve introduced good fortune, let’s go into that a bit more.  So, by good fortune I don’t mean jumping onto a train just before it leaves or meeting an old friend unexpectedly.  I mean money.  Pure and simple.  The Chinese pursuit of money is already famous enough, being in the heartland took it to a new level of insanity for me.  You can argue that it’s a hangover from days of starvation and abject poverty that were not so long ago and I’d agree.  Here are a people who will argue for half an hour over the equivalent of about twenty Australian cents.  It’s not that it’s worth that much, you would need three times as much to buy a softdrink.  It’s just so ingrained in their culture to preserve money above all else, that it would be unthinkable to let it go.  After I was there for over three months, I found myself having exactly the same argument with a drinks vendor for exactly that amount of money.  It wasn’t that I cared about the money, I just felt I was being ripped off and that is the clue to the Chinese state of mind.  When resources are in short supply, everyone is a penny pinching businessman.

When I spoke to a Taiwanese woman late in my trip, she made it even clearer.  She explained she didn’t like travelling in mainland China because she permanently felt like she was being ripped off.  She could never get the ‘best price’ because she wasn’t a local – they could tell she was from Taiwan by her accent.  I asked her what she thought it was like to have white skin and not speak Chinese in terms of getting a good price and she laughed and told me proudly that I would pay a lot more than her.  It’s all about getting the deal, a better deal than anyone else you meet.  People who are able to find these better deals are held in very high regard.  When I told her I’d managed to get a three star hotel room in Jinghong for just forty kuai (just under AUD$7) because I was travelling with a Chinese mother and daughter from Kunming, she was impressed with my using a local connection to get the best deal.  She immediately wanted to know how I knew them and  if she could get to know them too, since she had been thinking of visiting Yunnan province.

Now this leads me to talk about guanxi (goo-wan-shee) and its relation to good fortune.  Guanxi describes relationships between people, in particular where favours can be asked or demanded from someone.  Having these connections is a kind of social capital and a person with powerful connections is in high demand and ranks very highly in the social structure.  Many disagreements that in Australia are resolved in lower courts are resolved by a guanxi battle in China.  The discussion has nothing to do with the merit of solutions to the conflict, just that one person can establish a higher or stronger level of influence.  For instance, an argument my mate in Shanghai was having with a noisy neighbour ended up being resolved in one phonecall from his office manager with serious military connections.  The dispute had been festering for a while until guanxi made it clear who would win.  I was told in car accidents, the dispute is often resolved the same way.  So having ‘good guanxi’ is a  sure indicator of good fortune, since it means you don’t have to waste time arguing with people; you just establish your superiority.  Having friends in high places in China really is a free ride ticket to the easy life.

Now back to the pursuit of money, where it took on a particularly ugly form for me in Chinese Buddhist temples.  Sure you need some donations for the upkeep of the buildings and welfare of the monks.  However, the way they’ve turned what should be part of a religious experience into a strictly commercial transaction is disturbing and wrong.  The people arrive at the temple and spend about twenty minutes moving from altar to altar doing the standard kowtowing that always finishes with money going into the box.  I happened to be in a larger temple in Chengdu when they were emptying the boxes for the day.  The sack of money the two monks were carrying around grew so quickly that after the third altar they had to find a hand trolley to shift it to the next one.  I did some quick calculations and figured their take must have been in the order of 5-10,000 kuai – about AUD$1000-$2000.  That is a lot more than a monthly wage for a Chinese worker.  If they’re collecting that daily, I cannot understand what it’s being spent on.  I know it’s got little to do with building maintenance and construction, local businessmen pay for that separately in large scale public donations to increase their status.  Nobody questions this of course.  Giving money to the temple gives you good fortune.  You’re crazy not to do it.

So while we’re on the topic of the Chinese and religion I’d like to pass on my observation.  There are no religious Chinese people.  If there are, they are safely locked away in a monastery or living in a cave somewhere safely out of sight in case more people get the idea.  To be fair, I did meet two people who really seemed to care about their spiritual life in more than the surface ritualistic way.  They were in a tiny minority.  The Chinese are deeply superstitious, but in terms of religion they match Australians, Canadians, French and English for sheer atheistm camouflaged by the occasional appearance of religious intent.  Sure the Chinese people are much more likely to be found in a temple offering incense (bought at the temple for a price), but the religious practice starts and stops there.  The idea of personal enlightenment leading to some kind of inner peace that does not require material goods or wordly interests is insane to them.  They understand the idea as much as your average Australian and dismiss it as the preserve of freakish fringe dwellers like monks.  However, Chinese monks spend their time chasing money just as much as the next guy.  I saw them with begging bowls in the street, not asking for food – but strictly cash donations.

I also saw and spoke to more than one person who saw absolutely no problem with burning incense at a Buddhist temple, before striking the bell and drum at a Taoist temple, then a quick prayer in a Christian church before finishing it off with offering more incense to your ancestors.  Surely doing this in more places will bring you more good fortune?  Chinese superstition, however, is profound.  There are auspicious days to do anything – and you must consult before you take any action.  This means you pay money to someone to have a quick look for you.  Everyone knows about Feng Shui now, it’s still taken very seriously by the majority of the population.  You have to put coins in red bags, buy lucky charms in temples and a thousand other things to satisfy this superstitious drive.  The superstition is all neatly bundled under the standard answer, ‘for good fortune’.