Xinjiang Trip Day 25 (13-4-2007)
Without enough time to do any more serious traveling (i.e. going out to Emei Mountain or some other big sights) I just spent a day messing around. I did a little work in Starbucks, arranged plane tickets out of China (flying to Taiwan for a couple of days before going onto Malaysia), tried a couple of local snacks (jellified doufu mixed in a spicy sauce, or 豆花, and ‘dan dan noodles’, or 担担面, noodles in spicy peanut sauce).
In the evening I went to a teashop and did some writing up of my blog. A Wenzhouese guy at the next table started chatting with me and ended up coming over to join me. He was a nice guy. On hearing I had lived in Taiwan we yet again got onto the ‘Taiwan problem’. Unlike a lot of Chinese he was a reasonably logical debater. Not all of his arguments were very logical; for example, he said that since Taiwan was inhabited by people of Chinese descent it should logically belong to China (the example of Singapore demonstrates the silliness of this argument). However, he could understand a logical problem in an argument when it was explained to him, reconsider, and come up with a new argument. Not once did he raise his voice and insist that I did not understand China. I had to like the guy.
We talked for a couple of hours and he invited me out for hotpot the following night. His invitation was the usual Mainland Chinese ‘invitation to a foreigner I just met’. That is, he raised his voice so that everyone in the teahouse would know he, a Chinese, would be treating me, a foreigner, to hotpot the following night. He didn’t end up making good on his invitation but never mind. I had a feeling he wanted the thrill of inviting me out in front of his tea house friends more than he wanted to spend another evening chatting with me. After two hours of talking I had probably had enough of him too.
It was already quite late when I tried to get a taxi driver to take me somewhere I could get some traditional Sichuanese snacks. He took me to a touristified development called Jinli (锦里). It was something like Shanghai’s Xintiandi, a couple of lanes of restored or imitation Chinese lane houses, filled mostly with bars and restaurants. There was no Chinese food to be had so I ended up with a bad cheeseburger in a grubby but cheerful place called Claire’s or similar.
I was still hungry afterwards so I got another taxi and tried again. This time I had more luck and was taken to a strip of late night restaurants on the south side of the city that served congee and stir fried dishes. I ordered a pork dish with ginger and chili. The food didn’t really have a Sichuan taste, with the emphasis being on the pork and ginger. The manageress stopped by again to ask me how I liked it, and confessed that since I was a foreigner they had cooked a different dish to the one I had ordered. She told me that was what she used to do for her foreign customers when she ran her own small restaurant in the 1990s. I was slightly irritated, but she was trying to be nice so I didn’t show it.
She came back with photos of her old restaurant and customers. It seemed her place had been very popular with westerners. She thumbed through the photos and found ‘another New Zealander’ – a paunchy guy wearing a Chicago Bulls T-shirt. I suspected she was making things up to stimulate my interest in her photos. It was sad to watch her flick through the album though. Her restaurant had apparently been torn down when the government redeveloped the neighborhood and for various reasons (mostly problems finding a suitable space) she had never reopened it People imagine China as a place that is opening up and where the people now have more opportunities than ever before. The reality though is that for a lot of people the best times have already passed. In the southern coastal cities like Chaozhao, Shantou and Xiamen it is common to hear people bemoan the struggling economy, and the boarded up bar streets in some of these cities are testimony to boom times long gone. As always, the craze of the day changes. . .
