My mistake of taking the cheap, government-sanctioned tour is a
blessing in disguise. It got me to a Ming tomb (bland), the Great
Wall (accurately named), and an authentic tea house (good, except for
the expensive aged one that smelled like a fine blend of dog and horse
hair), but by far the best moments were at the jade shops. We were
required to stop at 2 different places carving the green stuff and
selling it for ridiculously much. But, before we're supposed to buy
pricey diced rocks, there were brief tours of how they're made. Right
near the start of the first one, I see this lady stop carving and
start rubbing her eyes. I don't know; maybe she's got a piece of jade
in them. She stops, but keeps her hands up. Just as I'm wondering
what's going on, WHACK: her supervisor comes up and pushes her awake.
I literally laugh so hard that I'm crying and a German guy tells the
bewildered guide that we were drinking before the tour. Narcolepsy is
not strictly a North American phenomenon.
Not so funny is the next jade guide, a rather fireplug-looking woman
who prefers the monotone bursting shouts style of English, when I
interrupt the canned schpiel upon seeing a guy carving an intricate
tiger with his hands pretty close to quick-moving metal. I ask if
many people get hurt during the making of their jade, and her answer's
2 words: "Yes, many."
But really unsettling is our government-sponsored tour guide Trevor.
He's 24, ambitious, and can be a little annoying (mainly because he
keeps waking me up during the ride to talk about Chinese history); not
entirely dissimilar from me:)
Apparently a hard-working guy, he claims he got up at 3 to make his
commute from South Beijing to our tour on time, is fluent in English
and Japanese in addition to Mandarin, and, most impressively, puts up
with having to take tourists to those same jade shops every day. More
because he's talkative and curious than from any urging by me, he
tells me that any Chinese citizen who wants to travel abroad for any
length of time has to put 500 thousand yuan (~$70,000) on deposit with
the Chinese government to warrant that he will return. I'm shocked:
there's large borders with unstable countries that must be relatively
open, so why don't people just leave? Apparently, they do. I explain
what a coyote (=smuggles people from Mexico/south into the U.S.) is
and learn that the term for Chinese reverse coyotes, who smuggle you
out, is "todu." I ask Trevor how much they cost and he replies "I
don't know, because then I would be tempted." I entertain arguments
that his plight in life is similar to mine, in that my indebtedness,
which is within an order of magnitude of his government bond
requirement, prevents my liberty because it means that I've got to
more or less make enough to be in the process of paying it back. But
this breaks down on a lot of levels under even the slightest scrutiny:
I'm doing what I want debt be damned, I've been many places, I'm
making drastically more than him, and I'm certainly not getting up at
3 to lead tours to shops that are boring on the first time and must be
excruciating by the 300th. I don't know that he always works harder
or who would score higher on an IQ test, and I don't care. Here's
someone similar to me whose life opportunities, hell, even expected
lifespan, is drastically downwardly defined because of where he
happens to have been born. Sort of makes it all seem a bit arbitrary,
doesn't it?
And then I am back on a train for the night, this one drastically
better and worse than the previous. The worst seat I can buy is
padded and has an armrest between me and the one person next to me,
touch-sensitive doors separate the halogen-illuminated, clean cars
that are not unlike rooms at a mid-range U.S. hotel, and large
Tsingtao beers, for 50 yuan ($0.80) or less are replaced with 12-ounce
boring Heinekens at 200 yuan ($2.50) per pop.
And there are MBAs. From Dallas, acutally. We speak broadly and
openly, as Americans abroad after a few beers and a random encounter
of compatriots often do, in no small part about what's right and wrong
with America and China. There's the engineer with a lack of people
skills, arguing that it was right to invade Iraq: we want the oil, so
we should take it and be harsher with quelling insurgency. And
there's the dumb token girl: frequently speaking over others, often
non-sequitors, and occasional Bush-style misuses of vocabulary. The
third, last of the group I meet, and most interesting for me because I
at least somewhat identify with him, is Wesley (I didn't remember his
name: he gave me his business card). He's 27, smart, doing business
development for a tech company, form a lower-middle-class background,
and his mom's even a nurse. But, from what I can assume based on a
few minutes speaking alone, he might be substantially more lost a life
than me: dropping $50k of his own money on a networking degree (he
doesn't agree with me when I describe it as such), recently dumped his
girlfriend because he's on business travel he doesn't particularly
enjoy all the time, and torn between climbing the corporate ladder and
doing something to try and help the world like his dad and younger
sister do. And leverage leverage leverage: he uses this word a lot,
but I think it wrongly implies his actions are adding up to something.
I and I'm sure he have to wonder whether it's really adding up to
anything and if the goal is worth the path. Call me self-indulgent
and spoiled, but it gets old to hear those with more voice jealousy of
me: Wesley isn't the first to say he admires that I'm traveling light
and not stuck doing business meetings and factory tours or any of that
shit, and I'm also often on the giving end of praise to those less
tethered than myself.
Imagine how Trevor must feel.