Beijing I – Flash Mob

Why do Chinese McDonald's need armed guards? Let me explain...

One of the delights of traveling to far-off, exotic destinations is the chance to experience cultural performances and sample the food. In Beijing, capital and grandest city of the most populous country on earth and repository of three thousand years of unbroken cultural history, this is especially true. So as we stumbled out of a Grand Master Flash concert, lurched in front of a speeding taxi and bellowed “McDonald's,” at the startled driver in drunken five-part harmony, I imagined a Lonely Planet contributor sneering disdainfully though his dreadlocks and stupid Tibetan beanie.

“Fuck you, Starshine Dylan Oakencock or whatever you fucking name is,” I laughed – possibly manically –  to the uncomprehending cheers or the four Englishers I had met earlier. Because, and let’s be honest for a moment, traditional music and dance – with the exception of Irish and Pirate – is crap. Especially so in most of Asia where it’s all puppets and screeching. But Grand Master Flash had been fantastic. Sweaty, old, hopefully drug-addled, he had made us dance like it was 1983, to mis-paraphrase Prince. This is the man who had simultaneously invented one of my favourite types of music – turntableism, and one of my favourite words – turntableism.

My four new BFFs and I sat in the still-stationary taxi, four in the backseat. I have, of course, forgotten their names but they were mildly posh so I’ll use suitable pseudonyms.

“Don’t worry,” yelled Chauncy Fobrent-Gleeb, “I speak mandarin. Ma don ards.”

“That’s not Mandarin, you bender,” opined Frosgoat Dimply-Nipples, “you’re just saying McDonald's in a racist accent.”

It seemed to work, however, and we were soon speeding through the night. Far, far away he dumped us in front of the golden arches.

“You all owe me 10 Yuan,” said Stephen Thumping-Bumtrot once he had paid for the cab. To the consternation of our little group, the restaurant was closed, so we did the only sensible thing and broke in to steal a menu.

“We can show this to the next taxi driver,” exclaimed Sodomy Feswick-Hyphen. So we did, and lo the next one was open, although it was getting light by then. We all ordered an obscene amount of terrible food, some of which we even ate. The rest we threw at each other.

At 6am, furry-mouthed and covered in gherkin, we called it a night and retired to our hostel, secure in the knowledge that we had acquainted ourselves thoroughly with China’s rich cultural heritage.

Shanghai to Beijing – Smog and Concrete

The sleek Shanghai-Beijing high-speed train

'309kmh’, the LED screen above the toilet read as we shot out of a long tunnel somewhere between Shanghai and Nanjing. I rested my head on the double-thick, sound-insulated glass and watched concrete pylons flash past, cables dancing violently up and down as they looped between. The neighbouring tracks ran straight and smooth. Every ten minutes an oncoming train would blur past, the 600kph combined speed squashing it short and buffeting us sideways. Apart from that the train was rock still. Twin cooling towers straight out of The Simpsons belched grey steam into the drizzly sky. Near the cities – Suzhou, Wuxi, Changzhou – skinny, black and concrete apartment blocks, some half finished, rose and closed together until we slowed into a clean, glass station. At one city, I forget which, I glimpsed a copy of the Empire State Building flitting between the office buildings and blocky tenements. Away from the apartment towers, rows of factories – the biggest I had seen – sat empty with smashed windows. I couldn’t tell if they were being built or pulled down. Between them barges further greyed the sky as they belched and chugged mounds of lime up canals to cement plants. The lime was uncovered and piled so high that the rain eroded poisonous white rivulets into the water.

At Zhenjiang a man got on and stood beside me, looking at my seat number. I moved back to my allocated seat. Neither of us spoke or looked at the other. North of Nanjing, we crossed the Yangzhe river – half a kilometer wide and choked with barges and boats big and small. I counted 50 as we flashed across the bridge but there were many more half visible through the drizzle and smog.

The enormous waiting room at Shanghai's high-speed train station.

The entire journey between Shanghai and Beijing – 1200km, halfway up China’s east coast – I saw hardly any agriculture, a handful of trees, no animals and few people. Just factories, high-rise housing, highways and mud. And over it all an unbroken pall of brown smog. It was the ugliest place I had ever seen. I was glad it was a high-speed train. 

Mao and Friends.

In Beijing I caught the Metro to Tiennamin Square. The square is huge. On a bad smog day – and this was definitely a bad smog day – from Mao’s mausoleum, the gate leading to the forbidden city is just a brown shadow. As I neared the gate, the massive portrait of Mao himself became clearer – fat-faced with too-smooth skin he looked smug, his eyes focused far above and beyond the crowds of Chinese tourists posing for photos. The air was Chinese greybrown, as I had come to think of the colour and it was impossible to say where the sun was. I shouldered and photo-bombed through thousands of camera-toting tourists into the nearby hutongs, or alleyways, looking for a youth hostel I had heard about. For half an hour a rickshaw driver dogged my steps, “You, tour, cheap. You, tour, cheap.” He chirped as I ignored him. When he could, he parked his rickshaw across the footpath, front wheel hard against a wall, completely blocking my path. Eventually I found an alley too narrow for his three-wheeled machine and hid.

Chilling out on Tienanmen Square.

 When I found my hostel, down yet another twisting alleyway, it had been knocked down. All that remained was a faded sign on a pane of broken glass. I wandered for hours until I found a hostel a few miles east of Tiananmen. From a concrete terrace I watched the sun set while an old man exercised his pigeons. They flew in tight, fast loops around and through a twisted tree. The old man in his flat cap and blue suit stood in a courtyard of a cracked red brick house. Their wings beating overhead drowned out the traffic noise and the dying sun shone dimly on the leaves. The old man and I stood still, only our eyes followed the birds as they cut inside each other and swooped and soared. It was strange and beautiful.

Despite everything – the ugliness, the rudeness, the coldness, the inhuman scale of the place – I was falling just a little bit in love with China.

Shanghai – Monsieur Tortue, mon sauveur!

On the floor in a Chinese Metro station. If you're laughing now, you're a racist.

Before I saw Tortoise Man – or Monsieur Tortue, it sounds funnier in French – I had been left a little cold by Shanghai. It’s the name, I guess - exotic, dangerous, sleazy, Eastern Shanghai. So why did it look and feel so clean and safe and sterile? In a couple of weeks in China I had understood absolutely nothing – the language sounded like a Tuvan throat singer raping a duck, the food all tasted like toenails and phlegm dipped in MSG, the people were all unfriendly, closed-faced mucus factories. It was wonderful – just what China should be. But Shanghai seemed different, or rather, not different enough, if you catch my drift. I spent my first week ordering burgers and quesadillas from English menus and chatting to friendly, engaged young people with good English. I kept expecting someone to tell me that I had caught the wrong train and was in fact in Singapore. I should say at this stage that friendly people in Shanghai are hardly the norm. In fact Shanghaiese on the whole are the most fantastically rude people I have met, but at least they’re actively rude – pushing, sneering, eye-rollingly rude –  rather than the blank, apathetic coldness I had encountered in the rest of China.

            So it was with a happy mix of relief and confusion that I saw a middle-aged man in a yellow hard hat holding a walking stick with a medium-sized tortoise balanced on top. Both of them, tortoise and man, blinked slowly and gazed impassively at the steady stream of high-heeled women and speeding taxis on the busy inner-city intersection. I perched on the seat of one of a thousand scooters parked on the footpath and watched for a good 15 minutes. He didn’t appear to be selling it for food, as I had suspected. He just stood there, as immobile as the tortoise.

            “What the fuck is that about?” I asked myself sagely. Why was it balanced on a stick? Was there some significance to the hard hat? It couldn’t be that dangerous, could it? None of the locals even looked twice. I was definitely in China.

            Once I had established that fact I spent the next month completely ignoring it. Instead, I lived the expat life – Singaporean beer, Mexican food and Irish pubs. I moved into my girlfriend’s flat, an anonymous but cozy concrete box halfway up a concrete tower surrounded by other concrete towers so similar they had giant numbers painted on them, for a too-brief but very sweet taste of domestic bliss. In the mornings I hung out of the window and watched the heads of a dozen pensioners moving in synchronized slow motion as they practiced Tai Chi. A couple of times a week men in suits let off fireworks to celebrate a new business venture. The rockets screamed up between the apartment buildings and rattled windows and set off car alarms as they burst and sent sizzling sparks bouncing through 12^th story windows. The businessmen would duck behind trees and benches and slap each other on the back, giggling until their supply was exhausted. Then they would pass around packs of imported cigarettes and go and get drunk. Or drunker. If Alicia wasn’t working we wandered down straight, broad roads lined with hole-in-the-wall restaurants and convenience stores and through underpasses over which even broader, straighter highways ran. Occasionally we caught glimpses of the Shanghai that was – an old man in a blue suit mending shoes next to an ancient single-speed bicycle or a row of wobbly houses with swooping roofs of cracked tiles. But mostly it was straight lines, concrete, glass and traffic.

Laundry day.

Twice we caught the Metro to The Bund where we pushed past the ‘mother tigers’ – middle-aged women, short and stocky with gravity-defying hair and hard elbows who love to storm onto train carriages the moment the doors open and have generally taken rudeness to a whole new level – to get off the train and walk to the river front. On one bank an unrelieved row of stern Victorian sandstone monsters wraps around the river. Across the river, beyond the chugging barges and tourist cruise boats, Pudong rises. With its spires, curved glass and primary colours, it looks uncannily like the city where TV’s The Jetsons lived.

Pudong. Meet George Jetson..

Every night we went out and lived large in the expat Disneyland that is Shanghai. We were joined by a veritable posse of Alicia’s English teaching mates as we hit the best value burger and beer joints, buffets and smoky local dives. It was marvelous. Most nights someone would decide it was a good idea to go to a club. And they were right, because Chinese clubs are fantastic. Young, hip people dress up and sit at high tables that occupy the space where the dance floor should be. They drink warm beer and play nonsensical dice games and scream conversations at each other over ear-splitting Korean screech pop. By the end of the night paralytic couples dry hump each other on couches while fat men with soft hands chain smoke and watch them intently. Our favourite club was a strange, curving place reached by mirrored tunnel. Think of the Starship Enterprise if it had been designed by Liberace and captained by Elton John. Like that only less restrained. The music was routinely awful and every night we were kicked off the dance floor for an hour while an odd little man in a white suit and enormous sunglasses mimed songs that none of us liked. But it had a big round bar in the middle and the $8 cover charge included all drinks. Most nights at around 4am someone would sit up abruptly.

            “Shit, guys. We’ve got class in 4 hours.”

            Everyone would sigh and finish their drinks and stagger outside. The best Mandarin speaker, or if it was a really heavy night just the person who could still speak, would hail a taxi while the rest of us pretended to have sex in a garden bed, or gave each other piggy back rides, or sang obscure 90’s pop ballads. After the taxi ride home, those of us who lived near each other would eat armfuls of grilled chicken skewers and oily fried rice served in a plastic bags before stumbling home.

The crew

Many thanks go out to Adrien, Stu, James, Sean, Dave, Marquia, Dorothee, Greg, Matt, Chris, Claire and especially and always to Alicia for showing me a ridiculously good time and for being my surrogate Shanghai family. After yet another tearful goodbye to Alicia, I boarded a train to Beijing – alone again and armed only with an out of tune ukulele and my native wit and charm. Oh dear.