At the Teahouse Cafe: Essays from the Middle Kingdom by Isham Cook

Author:Isham Cook [Cook, Isham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-05-08T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9 How to have fun in China’s disposable cities

“Qiu Baoxing [vice-minister of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development] said during an industry forum that Chinese buildings can only stand for between 25 and 30 years. In contrast, the average life expectancy of a building in Britain is 132 years and they last around 74 years in the United States.” (Qian Yanfeng, “’Most homes’ to be demolished in 20 years,” China Daily, August 7, 2010)

Shijiazhuang train station, 2012

How to have fun...

Let’s take a tour of a third-tier Chinese city, Shijiazhuang, “Stone House Village” (pop. ten million), capital of Hebei, the province that surrounds Beijing like the letter C. I choose this city after being invited there by a young woman I befriended recently in Beijing. The circumstances of our meeting were peculiar and quickly endeared me to her. I was making my way down an unfamiliar lane in the popular Nanluoguxiang bar area to kill time before an appointment with a friend, and stopped in front of a reggae club. Vaguely aware of a woman standing nearby, I walked inside for a drink. A moment later she came in as well and with a shy smile asked if she could join me.

Xiaozhen was 21, a college senior in management from Shijiazhuang, in Beijing to interview for prospective work in TV commercial acting. She had never been inside a bar before. While all Chinese cities nowadays have bars and nothing is stopping them from entering, few single women dare do so unless in the company of a man or group of friends. So she landed on me as an older gentlemanly type who could justify her presence. She refused to let me buy her a drink, even after I insisted on something nonalcoholic (young Chinese females seldom touch alcohol), reiterating my offer several times as is standard politeness.

How could such a pretty girl not have a boyfriend who could take her to a bar himself? She once had two, she said, but had broken up with them. Read: they grew impatient at being romantically restricted to polite handholding, without even the possibility of broaching the topic of sex, and had lost patience. But she was sweet and lovely, fully representative of her age and sex and times, despite the media’s trumpeting of the younger generation’s so-called liberalization.

She told me that if I ever visited her hometown she would be thrilled to show me around. Her very ordinariness made her the perfect guide to a most ordinary city. In fact I was often in that city on business but had never had any reason to venture out of my immediate area. We stayed in touch, and on my next trip there I set aside an extra day, reserving a room at the Jinjiang Inn chain that I prefer for their soft beds, strong showers, relaxing decor and thick walls.

The day before arriving, the branch I had reserved online informed me they were not “set up” to receive “waidiren,” and I had to stay at the one branch in the city that was.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.