So, two weeks in China and my overriding impression? People. Lots and lots of people.
It’s a cliché of course, but true in a very in-your-face way. Take Shenzhen, a city I’m ashamed to admit I’d barely heard of before the Family Savage decided to bring their never-ending arguments concerning table manners, body odour and other personal delights to our friends’ apartment.
Shenzhen was a fishing village at the end of the 70s, around which time Deng Xiaoping, China’s post-Mao reforming leader, chose it as the destination to make his famous ‘Poverty is not socialism. To be rich is glorious.’ speech. Now it has a population somewhere in the region of 3m-15m people (numbers vary widely due to whether/how you count workers who live there unofficially, due to China’s infamous hukou system, which prevents many migrants from registering there permanently and accessing public services). The block our friends lived in had four flats on each of the 25 floors, and 30 blocks in their compound. Multiply 10,000 or so people by the countless similar compounds that line Shenzhen’s artificially-wide, tree-lined avenues, and that’s a whole lotta baby-making, even given the One Child Policy.
Seems Shenzhen took Deng pretty literally then. But while it was lovely to be shown around by our unfailingly patient hostess-cum-tour-guide Eva, Shenzhen on the whole left me a tad unsatisfied – all the new development seemed to have sprung up without any real soul. Not that it wasn’t fun – particular highlights include a foot massage which turned out to be a whole body workover, while my unsuspecting parents emerged from their ‘shoulder massage’ two hours later, distinctly traumatised after a Chinese doctor had treated them to ‘cupping’, which left them with what can only be described as large, circular, purple lovebites, my Dad’s covered in orange blisters.
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One of our friends gets a ‘pedicure’
The other highlight was a night out in the swanky and very new Oct Bay area, where we met a Canadian guy who my Dad had been to business school with, who had up-shipped to Shenzhen a decade or so ago.The best/most embarrassing part of the night, at a bar called CJW (Cigars Jazz and Wine) with live covers by a band from Detroit and LA of everything from bossa nova to David Guetta, was my Dad and Eva christening the dancefloor. One of my Father’s signature moves involved getting down on one knee. My sister and I weren’t sure whether to laugh or cry.
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The Civic Centre in Shenzhen
After Eva warned my Mother that Chinese bus journeys involved people smoking and eating pungent food day and night, we were persuaded to fly out of Shenzhen rather than risk a smoky, neck-cricking ride. Next stop was Yangshuo, a town set on the Li River amidst the bizarrely-shaped limestone karsts beloved of traditional Chinese paintings. I was glad to stay out of town (with air conditioning and soft beds, hurrah!), as the centre resembled Bangkok’s Khao San Road, only with almost all of the Westerners replaced by Chinese tourists. Out of the numerous, identikit bar-clubs on offer, the one we ventured into on my sister’s 20th birthday had the standard tacky chandaliers and coloured lighting, complemented by wailing female singers and footage of swimming at the 2008 Olympics.
The two days in Yangshuo were spent getting hopelessly lost in paddy fields and village backstreets, in part due to enthusiastic locals both following us and pointing us every which way as we cycled through the beautiful countryside. Falling off a path into a paddy field was definitely not my finest hour, but seeing the ‘other side’ of China, albeit close to the tourist trail, was fascinating.
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The ‘night life’ in Yangshuo
We then attempted to go further off The Beaten Track, but while the accommodation definitely got more rustic, the Chinese government have definitely been reading the Lonely Planet, and we had to pay around £6 to enter both the villages we stayed in. The first, Ping An, had postcard-perfect rice paddies that look like contours on a map, while the second, Chengyang, had ancient wooden architecture with intriguing names like ‘Drum Tower’ and ‘Wind and Rain Bridge’.
What else, then, did I learn from my jaunt through a small southern corner of the People’s Republic? That the food is a lot tastier, healthier and less sweet ‘n’ sour than the Chinese back home. And while we think we avoided consuming anything remotely exotic on the trip, we did come face to face with half a dead dog hanging up in a market in town while shopping for ingredients during a cooking course, and I actually found myself pitying enormous rats that were sitting in cages outside restaurants, waiting to be picked and cooked.
Secondly, that the language barrier makes for exhausting travel. While China is coming to terms with itself as a global power, and there are adverts calling for English teachers everywhere, this hasn’t really filtered down to, well, anyone, and the huge majority of people speak only a few words of English, if any. Of course their efforts vastly outweighed the family’s pitiful Mandarin, though our sign language was superb, if I do say so myself.
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Rice paddies above Ping An
Finally, I learnt that while the highlights I have described above do (and here come the clichés again) make travelling worthwhile, you can never escape the pitfalls of foreign travel. These clustered in our final leg before heading back to Hong Kong, in Chengyang, and included a toilet that smelt somewhere between burning rubber and raw sewage and featured a friendly 10cm long spider, and getting stung just below my eye by a large wasp/hornet, which was not only excruciating, but makes me look like I’ve been in a fist fight. Oh, and getting a seat instead of the beds we’d booked for the night train back to Shenzhen, and having to spend 12 hours with my neck at 90 degrees (well it felt like it!) and a Chinese man snoozing against my back.
And now onto Japan from Hong Kong, but those will be other stories if you’ve got the patience to check ‘em out and I can tear myself away from reading The Hunger Games for long enough to write them: check out my blog at www.thesavagegirl.blogspot.com.
