China

Here's an excerpt about China in 1986 from my book I'll Let You Know When We Get There. If you have visited China lately, particularly in the back country, I'd like to know what differences you may have noticed. The Beijing area may not be a reliable indicator of change in rural areas.

The chapters in the book feature photographs that you'll miss here. The book is available at major booksellers, as well as on Lulu.com.

What are the people like? They’re hard workers. Untrained service personnel can be less than energetic like the fellow taking a nap on the hotel laundry, but laborers pull unbelievable cartloads of bricks with sweat dripping from every pore. They build new roads with mallets, shovels, and bare hands. They work eight hours in factories six days a week and sometimes through nights and holidays with no breaks except a half hour for lunch, and from dawn to dark in the commune fields.

Chinese people are polite to foreigners, especially if we remember China’s past when the term “foreign devils”was so richly deserved. Even in the crowded rush of Shanghai, if you establish eye contact with oncoming bicyclists, they will definitely go around you. And girls washing their hair in the street usually let you take their picture and smile happily into the camera through the soapsuds.

“What about sanitation?” clean friends at home want to know. “Was it dirty?” Qualifying your answer with “Yes—but,” leaves them in a state of confusion and that’s quite a good beginning for a little understanding. The Chinese don’t spend much time cleaning floors. “But why should we when everybody wears shoes?” they say. The public toilets of Chongqing still linger in my nightmares, but I didn’t see anybody using the roadside and that’s more than I can say for some countries. Country kitchens tend to be black with soot, but there is almost no trash lying around. They put it into containers shaped like pandas, frogs or elephants. Millions of the Chinese really do that. They don’t sterilize chopsticks. In fact they hardly rinse them off. But food is cooked fresh at very high temperatures, making it hard for germs to sneak into the fish tripe.

It’s a good idea to learn some dexterity with chopsticks. Foreigners with their conspicuous round eyes lose a lot of face if they keep dropping jellyfish and congee all over the table, and it’s downright embarrassing if, by mistake, they flip a thousand-year-old egg into the open mouth of someone sitting nearby. Not that Chinese waiters don’t empty ashtrays and pour tea on the tablecloth, but they intend to.