Apologies to My Censor: The High and Low Adventures of a Foreigner in China by Moxley Mitch

Author:Moxley, Mitch [Moxley, Mitch]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-07-02T04:00:00+00:00

11

Chocolate City

We wandered the streets and alleys and garbage-strewn crevices of central Guangzhou, the southern Chinese metropolis once known as Canton, on the Pearl River delta, and marveled at what was for sale.

Everything.

There were oversized stuffed animals, Christmas decorations, fake plastic trees, neon signage, buttons, and bulk candy. There were paper, plastic, and reusable bags; stationery, sneakers, and scooters; Jay-Z T-shirts and LeBron James jerseys and pleather jackets. Butchers sold parts of animals I couldn’t identify. One shop had the flattened, dried-out face of a dead pig dangling from its awning, like some macabre Halloween mask.

We arrived in Guangzhou from Macau in the middle of the week. We shared a room in a hostel on the south side of the Pearl River. I was on a tight budget, living off my one and only check from Asia Weekly and some money I had borrowed from my parents.

That morning, we set out exploring. It was a humming city, the Asia of my imagination. Beijing could be chaotic, but Guangzhou was different: the hot, humid, sweaty mayhem of a southern Chinese city. In the old part, the narrow streets were warrens of chaos lined with palm trees. Overhead, elevated freeways clogged with traffic offered views of apartment towers with barred balconies strung with drying laundry. The new areas displayed the city’s growing wealth, featuring soulless apartment complexes, wealthy residents with spotless Audis and Mercedes, and high-rise buildings plucked from the Hong Kong skyline.

Tom, Jim, and I wandered the city that first day, stopping for noodle soup, drifting in and out of shops, and asking the prices of things we’d never buy. My Chinese was lower-intermediate now and I enjoyed the broken banter with shop owners: I feigned anger when they blatantly tried to rip me off, and I walked away once I’d haggled them down to a tenth of the original price.

Guangdong province was nicknamed “the World’s Factory.” In the fall of 2008, when we visited, it was home to 28,000 industrial firms, including 15,000 overseas-funded businesses. It made 75 percent of the world’s toys and 90 percent of its Christmas decorations (in a country that doesn’t celebrate Christmas). In Guangzhou, the provincial capital, it was all available directly from the source and at a discount.

Over the years, this access to cheap goods had attracted traders from around the world. When it was known as Canton, the city was China’s first port opened for trade with foreign countries. The British, Americans, French, and other world powers settled on a small island called Shamian, and evidence of Guangzhou’s colonial history remained in the form of ornate European-looking buildings that housed overpriced, mediocre restaurants, and a Starbucks filled with American couples waiting to adopt Chinese babies.

By 2008 the most visible foreign community in Guangzhou was African. These were the people we had come to meet. What had been a small group of a few hundred traders a decade earlier numbered as of 2008 as high as twenty thousand, according to the few articles we could find.

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