Spiritual Spearmints

This is a continuation of my journal from my life in China. It was a chaotic, unimaginable time, and these journals do a great job capturing the essence of life in that land of misery. You might think I’m exaggerating in these posts. I am not.

There are things people need to know. And information isn’t like air: it doesn’t just hang there, luminous in the aether, waiting to be breathed in and metabolised. News ain’t metaphysical. So I’ll be the purveyor.

China, quite simply, baffles the mind. But not in an awe inspiring sort of way. It’s like, if you saw someone building a leaning tower of feces. Of scat. You’d walk past and think, “Are they honestly doing that? Is this for real?” What possible combination of mental gymnastics could induce them to indulge in such a plainly horrendous effort? You would ask yourself this, but there’d be no answer. Well, that’s the situation here.

The event that inspired me to write this happened earlier tonight as I was coming home from the grocery store. China, anticipating booming growth, has built massive highways in the middle of nowhere. I’m living in the middle of nowhere, and so consequently, every road is at least six lanes wide. And they’re usually completely deserted. Walking across the street tonight, I heard a blaring horn. I had checked the street before crossing. It’s wise to do this in America, and it’s absolutely necessary to do this in China. However, there were no cars present. But, I heard a horn, so I looked. About a hundred yards down the road there was a car. His high beams flashed, and he blared. I looked around. Was he really honking at me?

There was no one else on the street—six barren lanes, and 100 yards between us. I stopped, and waited to see this. He not only continued honking, but moved into the middle of the road. Towards me. He clearly saw me. He wasn’t going to hit me. But, he merged one lane over, and as he approached, he straddled the double yellow lines, driving on both sides of the road. I just watched. He kept honking, and then about twenty yards away, swerved and carried on driving past. I saw a middle aged man driving, his wife leaning over to his side to look out the window, an expression of dire concern on her face.

Now, you might read that and think that perhaps he was just fooling around. Having a laugh. But the Chinese don’t do those sorts of things. All spark of individuality, creativity, life, has been crushed out of them. They are automatons. So this man’s reasons will never be known. No, I’m sure I know them. He was Chinese.

This experience is at the forefront of four months of civil abuses—condemnations of common sense and laws of reasonable human practises which are absolutely astounding. I’ve learned that in China, you don’t ever really come out on top. You never “win”. You just lose by degrees, all the time. Sometimes it’s more, sometimes it’s less. Eventually though, you come around to the Chinese way of thinking, where losing less starts to feel like a victory. It’s training your mind to think laterally. Impediments are constantly placed before you, and over time you just learn to walk sideways. Like a crab. Like an animal. Going forward stops being an option. I’m sure after a generation or two, the very idea of “forward” would just lose all meaning. Take comfort though: in China, you’ve never lost so much that you can’t lose more.

Even the idea that, “Well, if nothing else, I have my health”, begins to lose meaning. After all, what’s up with that cough you’ve had the last three weeks? It hasn’t gotten worse, I guess that’s true. But it hasn’t gotten better either. And was that blood in your toothpaste this morning? Has more hair been falling out than usual? Do you look thinner? After studying my reflection in the mirror this morning, I know I’m not the same man I was when I got here. By about ten pounds.

I recently went on a trip down to Yunnan to get a little southern flavour. It was a nice diversion, but there were constant reminders that even though the scenery had changed, we were still in China baby. Since the Cultural Revolution, China has tried to pick up the pieces from when they destroyed all their own history. Every vaguely historic or culturally relevant artefact was burned to the ground. Yay, progress! So today, they’re frantically trying to rebuild all those monuments and make them look like they used to. They even advertise that a building which is only about six or seven years old, was really built about a thousand years ago. My friend Phil mentioned this to one of his Chinese co teachers, and she informed him that this was true everywhere in the world. There were no “real” old monuments left, they just didn’t exist anymore. Everyone just built them again. Remember Stonehenge? The Coliseum? The Parthenon? None of those are really old. Those respective countries simply built them a few years ago to look old. Just like China!

We all can learn so much from China.

But if nothing else, there are no beggars in China. I haven’t seen one since I’ve been here. This might sound like a brilliant stroke towards improving humanity. The reality is that there are no beggars because everyone is so poor. So there, again: you don’t really win, you just lose a little more of what you had before. It’s an eccentric spiral that circles a never ending drain.