The Chinese Post Office continues to excel. We’ve had scraps before. This was the outfit that wouldn’t let me send Christmas cards in different sized envelopes, or send copies of my thesis to an Australian university in any box but their own.
Zhengzhou has been under heavy attack for several days, apparently to chase out accumulated devils. These aren’t minor explosions, though I have been dodging small boys for a couple of weeks. The streets are cleared of the usual surging crowds and most shops were shuttered yesterday. Every rooftop and courtyard is smoking with cordite. The favourite seems to be a thing that is a metre long and about 2.5 cm in diameter. This ejects explosive devices at ten second intervals, and they travel for about 100 metres before shattering with a mighty boom. Basically, it is a mortar. Heaven knows what the casualty figures are. All the foreign devils except me have certainly been chased out of town.
China has one of the world’s biggest rail networks. With 20% of the world’s population that is hardly surprising, and it still comes nowhere near meeting demand on existing networks, or on actual network coverage in densely populated provinces like Henan with its 100 million + people. It is a mind-bending logistics operation, greatly improved since I last knew it (1998-2000) when you couldn’t even buy a return ticket. At that time the rail system, like China itself, was an assembly of feifdoms, each jealously guarding its influence and finances. Things have mellowed a bit, though around 20 people a day are killed somewhere on the network (better than 600 or so deaths a day on the roads, according to the OECD). From time to time even a main trunk line may be virtually closed for hours at a time as some “leader” flashes through under maximum security in his special train. At its worst, as in the Chinese New Year, you can have impossible crowds fighting for non-existent seats. 100,000 were camped out around Guangzhou station this year. At its best, on the main line bullet trains (D-trains) there is air conditioned comfort with airline type uniformed hostesses.
This city of Zhengzhou is showing me new faces at every turn. There are vast prestige complexes and broad tree lined avenues alongside scenes that come straight from Hogarth’s England. As the seasons change you can move from balmy autumn walks by the riverside to bleak canyons and culverts of mouldy concrete where street sellers try to eke out a living.
Thor’s China Diary began in 1998, from Wuhan where I taught in a couple of universities. The air was different then in more ways than one. They gave me a little green book listing all the things that foreigners were not supposed to do. China was getting some confidence in wicked capitalist ways, but the public language never said so. Things were cheap, but the salary was laughable. And the real air was so thick you could cut it with a knife.
A record of those times can still be found at http://thormay.net/chinadiary/diarysitemn.html . It all came to an end a couple of years later when I was sucked off to South Korea, a financially richer destination with its own charms, but definitely a colder experience on the local friendship front. Of course, I’ve changed a bit too. Ten years in East Asia does that too you … an old fool turning into an older fool? Maybe I’ve just learned to moderate my Australian road rage, imitate the locals who are pretty tolerant most of the time. The big difference there is that ultimately I have a ticket out to a different set of absurdities, while they are stuck with the local absurdities.
This new parking spot, Zhengzhou in Henan Province, central China does not look promising from a distance, but close up it’s not too bad at all if your survival kit is in order : an air conditioned apartment and a credible income, it least by Chinese standards. The city is as flat as a pancake, but made decent by its tree-lined avenues. Twenty kilometers away across the parched plains, the Yellow River wends its sluggish way between high earth levees, but Zhengzhou’s main claim to fame nowadays is as a railway junction. Amazingly the sky is often blue, something I never saw in Wuhan. The urban population is supposedly about 4 million, and seems to be growing fast, fed by uncounted rural-to-urban migrants. There are luxury shops and the direst poverty side by side. Satellite TV is banned, and any Google search will automatically stall if you enter “Zhengzhou”, but if you can walk around these kinds of authoritarian anachronisms, the mood on the streets is pleasant enough. Around here they are big on al fresco dining, footpath style, but if you want a simple coffee shop you’ll perish. Three thousand, five hundred years ago this was the capital of China, so I guess they’ve had time to sort out the local preferences. Anyway, it suits me well enough for a while…
postscript : Anyone interested in a wider range of Thor’s ideas, his CV, poems, photos, and a bunch of stuff on teaching and learning English as second language should check out http://thormay.net. That is a sprawling website, not a blog.
cheers, Thor
