The rough track turned onto the concrete path that circuited the lake. They paused in the shade for Will to catch his breath. It had been six days of chronic diarrhoea, the first two coupled with intense nausea and vomiting. He had managed a few bread rolls and two bowls of rice in that time. He could see what were left of his muscles after four months of travel shrinking before his eyes. He was energiless, and everything had become an effort. Despite the illness and several things that needed clearing up back in the city, Will had escaped what had become his private hell to return to the sweet scents, fresh air and wholesomeness of Rashit’s yurts at Tian Chi. As he and Dale, a British traveller he had met in Turpan a few days earlier, had dumped their packs and stretched themselves out in the sunshine, Will could physically feel himself unwind. Knots in his back undid themselves and his hunched, harassed posture became erect. His knitted brow smoothed itself of creases, and a hint of a smile entered the corners of his eyes and mouth. Once again the sweet smell of pollen-laden conifers and the brisk alpine air worked their magic. He even felt he might take on the challenge of a walk the next day in defiance of the disease that plagued him, although this did not eventuate.
Now, as he caught site of the crumbling concrete structures that resembled fairytale objects like giant mushrooms, tension twanged his muscles. The structures had been placed along the lake edge: ill conceived, poorly finished and blatantly distracting from the epic natural scenery in which they were placed. This was typical of the Chinese attitude to the gems that blessed their country. Rounding the corner, noise also suddenly permeated their consciousness. Music sounded from the lake’s entrance. As they reached its source, it grew into a deafening cacophony of horrid Chinese singing, rasping as the speakers struggled to cope with the volume. Chinese women strutted about on heels of phenomenal height wearing what typical wealthier Chinese women wear: lurid mismatching outfits of tight three-quarter pants and tops revealing horrendous figures coupled with garish jingling bling, overpriced and oversized sunglasses not quite covering the heavy layer of makeup and whitener, accessorised with a sun umbrella resembling a lamp shade and a glaringly coloured mobile phone occasionally blaring some grating ring tone (often in English which, like the slogans on their tops, they would have no idea as to what it would say). Obese, squinting men stepped out of black fake European or Japanese SUVs, but not before loudly clearing their sinuses and spitting in front of everyone. The muscles that had unwound in Will just recoiled.
From the path a little while back they had spied what had appeared to be rows of Kazakh women lined along the lake edge in traditional, if somewhat too brightly coloured, costumes. It was now revealed that these were in fact racks of replica costumes in a rainbow of fluorescent colours held by Chinese touts for the benefit of Chinese tourists so that they could put on the costumes and have their photo taken in front of the lake panorama. Will fumed. He had not seen one of these tourists bothered to actually walk the lake or up the valley to appreciate the serenity and nature. In fact he wondered why on earth these people actually bothered to make the effort to come. He could guess, though: because it was fashionable, all their friends did it, people said it was something to see, and they could add a few more photos to their album to enrage jealousy in their counterparts. The concrete yurts, the kitsch additions to the scenery, the music, the cable car of hot pink, yellow and baby blue carriages, the dam that looked like a fortress at the headwaters, and the speed boats zipping up and down the lake to destroy the peace all made the place feel like a monster theme park was engulfing the place. Will had asked Rashit whether he thought the road that was been constructed to the lake was a good or bad thing.
“Good,” he had replied without explanation.
Will thought that it might encourage business in the short term, but the aspects that attracted so many foreign tourists to the place and enabled people like Will to expound the virtues of the spot to tourists along his travels would slowly be eroded.
The bus rides home went without hitch, but Will could feel his body twisting with frustration as the taxi pulled up to the hostel that had been his cell for the last few weeks. It had been three weeks of waiting. Firstly, a Chinese visa that took persuading to be extended to 20 days, not the standard 10 they were handing out to most people. Then a refusal at the Kazakhstan embassy to acquire a visa on Will’s other passport, despite having copies of the passport he had used to enter China and his visa, because they wanted to see the original (not that Will could figure out why because it really had nothing to do with them, as the Chinese would take care of him if there was anything wrong in that department). He then discovered that he would require a double entry Kazakh visa and single-entry visa to Kyrgyzstan in order to just complete the trek he wanted to do, as it crossed borders (despite there being no border checkpoints). In order to obtain the Kazakh visa he would require a letter of invitation, for which he would have to wait a week. He decided to acquire a Kyrgyz visa whilst waiting for the letter of invitation. Lucky he did, as the letter, which was meant to arrive on a Monday, only arrived on a Thursday evening. On the Friday Will once again entered the Kazakh embassy, prepared with all the possible documentation he could think of, only to be informed that the embassy could only give out single entry visas. He protested the point, trying to explain that he wanted the visa for a trek in Kazakhstan in which he would be spending a lot of money, but they were obstinate. Will was later informed by the Kazakh Ministry of Foreign Affairs, through various travel agencies, that this was in fact illegal of them to refuse him. He had thought that they were just being lazy – not knowing what to do with something slightly out of the ordinary. Will replied that he wasn’t exactly in a position to argue, and in fact had run out of time on his Chinese visa: he didn’t trust the embassy to get the passport back to him on the correct date as a Japanese traveller had been misinformed as to his pick up date, and had consequently had to wait a further four days due to a public holiday in the interim. Will didn’t feel like being stranded in China beyond his visa and having to pay some ¥500 a day fine.
So all in all Will had had enough of Urumqi. Coupled with his illness, and a growing rage at the ‘peculiarities’ of the Chinese, he was fed up. Will had been struggling for a while to pinpoint exactly what these peculiarities were. It was not the undercurrent of poverty or the lack of cleanliness – he had been fine with Bangkok and even the most primitive of villages in Laos. It was not the experiences he had had in China – his trips to Songpan and Yushu would remain ingrained in his memory forever. It was something about the people. Will had been a peaceful, open-minded individual before entering China. He was now full of a rage he could not define and complete disrespect for an entire nation.
Will started to try and work out what could be possibly causing this attitude. Was it something about the way in which the Chinese were so arrogant about their apparent superiority, whilst not even realising the sorts of practices they performed that were so completely amoral, backward and illogical? Someone said that the Chinese were simply having the industrial revolution that the West had had. Will disagreed. The revolution in Europe and America was fuelled by a fervent desire to progress, and inspired by ingenuity and innovation. China’s ‘revolution’ was built on imitation and appropriating the practices and inventions of others. The Chinese are more than happy to display their Prada sunglasses and Louis Vitton bags, whilst spitting anywhere, not washing their hands after wiping the excrement from their backsides and throwing trash into every corner of their surroundings. They clamber over themselves to slap a superlative such as ‘heavenly’ on a spectacular natural area, whilst plonking hotel complexes within it, dumping truckloads of refuse down its valleys, and damming its watercourses.
Someone else excused their ignorance as a product of the Cultural Revolution. But few Chinese Will had spoken to had even the inclination to have even a sliver of curiosity about the outside world, apart from the tripe fed to them by American record companies or the catalogues of goods in fashion magazines digested by Chinese media from their European counterparts. Most people Will spoke to in China didn’t even know which countries they bordered. Most Chinese couldn’t even grasp a map of their own city in Chinese, let alone a global atlas. And this was another peculiarity: not only did many Chinese not have an interest in the outside world, they had little knowledge of the rest of their own town beyond the general routine of their daily lives. People, when asked about simple things about their city like interesting sites, certain shops, directions etc., would either be unable to offer any help or give incorrect information. They were sheepishly happy to accept the limited and convoluted news reports of what was happening in the rest of their country.
Having said this, the Chinese government holds an insidious tentacle grip on the information its citizens receive. Many sites that Will tried to access were blocked – even Facebook worked only now and then. It is ineffective to communicate between cities as you move, as a mobile bought in one town requires the purchase of a new sim card in another. Not only this, but the government is happy to cut communications if necessary. After the quake, communications in the region shut down. The government reported that this was a direct consequence of the quake, but many people I have spoken to that were in affected areas claim communications ceased some time after the quake actually occurred – somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes. This more likely indicates that the government was figuring out what exactly it wanted to do with the quake in the public arena: use it or make it disappear.
The tragedy is that it is this filtered information, copycat culture and inability to communicate that prove the defeat of the Chinese. It is highly effective in allowing the government to maintain a top-down approach to control of a country built for both consumption by it citizens and the consumerist whims of its trading partners. But it does not allow the dissolution of ideas through the population that evolve out of necessity. It does not allow the dissemination of ingenuity and new ways of approaching life issues. It does not allow someone on one side of the country to say: hang on, I’ve got a good idea that could improve our lives, maybe the rest of the country should hear about it? It requires years struggling through the quagmire of procedural bureacracy and corruption before the government desires to fix a systematic problem. It does not allow the people to organise their dissatisfaction and do something about it. In other words, forget Afghanistan, Central Asian autocracies, small one-party states like Laos: China is the enemy of democracy.
The summation of Will’s frustration with China is that the vast majority of Chinese seem to have a complete inability and lack of desire to think. The isolationist attitude is just one aspect of this. But in everyday life, there seems a complete lack of desire to pause for a moment and say: wait a minute, if I did this in another way, and if I could persuade other people to do the same, everyone’s life would be made infinitely easier. As a consequence chaos and inefficiency reign. Take traffic. Whilst insane traffic problems are not uncommon to other Asian centres like Bangkok or Vietnam, China has the infrastructure already in place and reduced traffic density compared to these areas that the problems are solvable, at least if people would obey by some simple rules. A place like Urumqi has quite wide boulevards, an ordered traffic system, for example circuit loops attempt to reduce congestion, and little two-wheeled traffic, which all in all make travelling on the road not so bad. At least, if everyone stuck to rules. But running red lights, a complete disregard for pedestrian traffic, churning up median strips to get to another road, driving on the wrong side of the road, not sticking to lanes, turning left across four lanes, etc. etc. are all common practice. As is the exasperating habit of the Chinese to use their horns every five seconds. And it’s not the chaos that is so painful. In a place like Bangkok it is the sheer density of traffic that makes it so bad, and consequently people do crazy things simply to avoid it. It’s that if only people would pause for two moments and think, hang on, I don’t actually need to be doing this, and if I didn’t everyone would actually get where they want to go much more safely and swiftly.
Will woke as Dale shook him awake again. He had snoozed his alarm, despite knowing that he needed to rise in order to catch his plane. The illness and sleepless nights in the stuffy dorm were taking their toll. Fortunately Will had packed and readied himself the evening before, so all that was required was to get dressed, brush teeth and pack the last couple of things into his carry-on luggage. Dale was catching a flight to Kashgar at a similar time so that they had decided to share the taxi fare to the airport. They arrived and the two of them went to the information counter. Dale was instructed to one of the local airline check-in counters, and the pair shook hands and parted company. Will was directed to the China Southern counters. He could not make out which counter he was meant to be attending, so he stood in a line he thought appropriate, hoping it might be correct.
Suddenly Will was approached by a Chinese attendant who spoke rough English and examined his ticket and directed him to a different counter. When he finally got to the counter, the attendant examined his ticket, puzzled. She called the attendant who had initially examined his ticket, who then informed him that he was in fact at the wrong place and asked Will to follow her. He obeyed, annoyed but now not unused to the to-and-fro games that were often played in China when things didn’t go smoothly. The attendant directed him to a set of stairs and informed him that he was ‘required to check in downstairs’. He hauled his bags down to a large foyer. It was dark and empty, with little sign of life. He walked around a little, puzzled as to where he was required to check in, as their was not a soul in sight except for an official. Will examined the signs. He was at the arrival terminal. The departures were upstairs, where he had just come from. The official noticed Will wandering aimlessly around, and approached him, asking him again in rough English as to where he needed to go. Will proffered his ticket. The guard chuckled then pointed out of the building across a carpark to a decrepit looking concrete box with a rusting neon sign atop claiming the destination as ‘Urumqi’. This, apparently, was the international terminal. Will was furious. Like all the problems in the country that required fixing, like all the issues that required the Chinese to exert slightly more effort than is required, to think, to go beyond mediocrity and the mundane routines of their small worlds, Will as a problem had been swept under the carpet, and lead to the dark, empty arrival hall, out of sight and mind.
Will finally stumbled into the foyer of the airport after a young official had asked for his passport, glanced at a nearly blank page and realising he wouldn’t be able to read it anyway, gave it back to Will. Will was exhausted. He paused before the check-in counters to try and eat something before having to lose the food he had brought for breakfast at the customs gate. He ate a dry, sweet bread and drank a little water, and dumped the rest. Time was beginning to tick away, but he was still only there just past the commencement of the check-in time. He joined a queue and waited. Only, the Chinese in the line didn’t make it a queue. They crowded up against the people in front in a disorganised mess. A Russian kept turning and glaring behind him as a Chinese woman constantly unashamedly shoved her trolley against his legs as the line crept forward. The line was reducing painfully slowly, and Will was at the back of it. Many people were being asked to open sealed check-in luggage to check their contents. All sorts of packages were checked and confiscated. Small vials of medicine, probably some poor old Kyrgyz’s vital medication, were poked and unsealed. One Russian woman had a kettle she had bought confiscated. There seemed to be abnormal paranoia. The irony, Will later realised, that he had been allowed on the plane in his carry-on baggage an assortment of items that could have been infinitely more dangerous: two one-litre alloy canisters and a tea flask which were not checked, several batteries that could have been used as a power source for a bomb or could have been detonators in disguise, various powders, pills and potions in his first aid kit, and a mobile phone. Will sighed, another form of Chinese illogic.
Snowy peaks rolled away underneath the plane as Will made an attempt at the bread roll, a handful of grape tomatoes and the steamed rice and vegetables in his airplane meal. All he could think about was how glad he was to be leaving China behind. It was sad that a country with so much promise had descended into a nation that was devouring itself, and had the potential to devour the world around it. Will wondered how he would eventually remember China, and wether the incredible experiences he had been blessed with would shine through the muck that had tainted his trip there. Flashes of red-robed monks, smiling Tibetans, Rashit’s friendliness and genuine concern at his illness (he had offered him a homemade Kazakh herbal remedy, which would probably have worked had his illness been simply food poisoning), dramatic scenery and crisp alpine air went through his mind. Hopefully the photos he had taken would remind him forever of these things, and not the frustrations of his visit.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the stewardess announced over the PA system, “we are now descending into Bishkek.”
