360 Degrees Longitude by John Higham

Author:John Higham
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Prospecta Press
Published: 2012-11-12T22:00:00+00:00

14.

The Cruise Ship of Pain

November 26–December 15

The People’s Republic of China

First impressions can teach you a lot about a person or a place. They can also be terribly deceiving. China was more different from what I had imagined than any other place we visited during our 52 weeks abroad. That impression started upon our arrival in Beijing. I saw a vibrant and modern city with wide streets. Its citizens were dressed no differently than, say, those of Seattle. Perhaps I was expecting a dirty, gray city whose citizens dressed in drab clothes and scurried about going to political party meetings? Despite the cosmopolitan veneer in Beijing and other major cities, by the time I left China I realized it was a world so different from mine, visiting was like interplanetary travel without the inconvenience of leaving Mother Earth.

We had laid out the route for the World-the-Round Trip prior to our departure so we would experience perpetual summer. That was the plan. Later, when we realized we would be arriving in Beijing in late November, September asked, “How cold do you think it’ll be?”

“Probably a wee bit,” I said, “but it isn’t officially winter until the end of December. We should be okay.”

Not. It was bitter cold. “If we’re going to see Tiananmen Square and hike the Great Wall,” September announced after our arrival, “we’re going to need some winter clothes.”

Our hostel in Beijing was in its own little world, known as a hutong: a black hole of a neighborhood. A hutong is bounded by a large city block, but once inside there is an absurd maze of “streets” intended for pedestrian traffic with the occasional car snaking through, simultaneously scraping paint off both sides of the mortar work. Rumor has it that people live their whole lives in a hutong and never leave. Truth is, they just can’t find their way out. A casual visitor to the city may see the wide streets and the dazzling lights, but you can’t understand the soul of the city without stepping inside a hutong. It’s a metaphor for China as a whole.

If you knew the way without getting lost, our hutong was a few minutes by foot from Tiananmen Square. In those few minutes there were no fewer than three KFCs and enough North Face counterfeit outlets to outfit the army of a medium-sized country. Of course that is where the tourists shop and eat. Beijing residents shop and eat in the countless markets and nameless shops that make up the soul of the hutong.

On our way to Tiananmen Square, we filled the gaps in our cold weather gear for about what one would expect to pay for lunch for one. On the flight from Japan, we had a long discussion about, of all things, copyright infringement, intellectual property, and counterfeit products. Yet, while shopping for cold-weather gear it was evident that we simply couldn’t purchase verifiable genuine name brands. Items were priced too low to be genuine. Most were similar in form and function to the name brands, with a slight misspelling of the name.

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