Guangzhou

I spent the weekend in Guangzhou, China. Rachel and I caught the through-train from Kowloon on Friday evening, and had fun changing the lyrics of "Midnight Train to Georgia" into "Midnight Train to Guangzhou". We arrived a few hours later, met up with Seiji, Luke and Diana (the other Yale-China teachers), and ate amazing, spicy noodles on a side-street near Zhongshan University. The people who ran the noodle shop were Chinese Muslims-- a minority I knew existed but had never seen until this trip. They look-- different. More Central Asian. So weird to see ethnicities your brain doesn't know how to categorize. After dinner we watched the Amerified remake of The Grudge on pirate DVD-- funny to see Sarah Michelle Gellar (trying to) speak Japanese. Even more horrifying than the movie was the thought that I must look like that when I (try to) speak Cantonese. The next two days saw ample opportunities to do so, as Guangzhou is part of Guangdong, land of Guangdungwa. Most people speak Putonghua (Mandarin) also, but it was exciting to try to speak Canto in its home turf-- and usually without the option of English (that is more widely spoken in Hong Kong).

Guangzhou was also great because of...

- Dirt cheap DVDs (including really unexpected finds, like Tarkovsky, Fassbinder, Beat Takeshi box set, all for 6 quai each, about .75 US cents)
- Amazing food (spicy noodles! daan-tat [dim sum egg tarts]! the best boba tea i've yet had in asia!)
- Little white pekingese-faced dogs everyplace
- Cute babies
- Very few Western tourists (I think I saw maybe 5 white people in 3 days, besides Luke and Rachel and myself in the mirror)
- Old pretty colonial buildings on Shamian Dao
- Visiting the awesome gallery Vitamin Creative Space where they're installing a new show by Zheng Guogu
- Going to a bar called "E.T. Space". Yes, like E.T. the Space alien. The decor made it feel like the inside of an insane clown's brain. And when Luke came back from the bathroom, he related that while at the urinal an "attendant" came up to him and placed hot towels on his neck and massaged his shoulders. While he was peeing. How thoughtful.
- Meeting some of Seiji's students
- Hanging out with chicks named Lion and Keanu
- A reflexology foot massage that was better than drugs

On the other hand, there were some disturbing things I saw in Guangzhou...

-The insane pollution. I thought Hong Kong was bad, but in GZ we were trying to hail a cab in the middle of a freeway (don't ask), and I looked up and suddenly realized that there was this skyscraper on the other side of the road that disappeared into the smog about two-thirds of the way up. Although the Pearl River didn't smell as much like feces as I had remembered.

- A bizarre stand-off between a bunch of cops and a bunch of ethnic minorities. These men in blue fezzes were standing around on this busy shopping street, surrounded by cops who were trying to arrest them (?) for not having hawking permits... or something. But there was a huge crowd and I felt like any minute it was going to escalate into violence (maybe I was being paranoid because of the fierce clashes between Han Chinese and ethnic minorities in Hunan last week). Eventually it dispersed.

- Police apprehending a criminal on the street and proceeding to beat him. Then take off his shoes, drag him across the street by the hair, and use his belt to tie his hands. We didn't watch the rest.

- A child being beaten with a badminton racket by her grandmother. On her face and back.


Overall, it was a good trip. The last time I was there, in March of 2003, it was raining, it was cold, I had some kind of flu, SARS had just started (they had barely named it, it was just "this virus" that was spreading around and killing people), and then, to top it all off, in the middle of a round-table discussion with Zhongshan legal students, about the ability to protest your government, a Guangzhou girl answered her tinkly-cute cellphone and then reported to the group: "Excuse me everyone, but, uh, the war has begun." President Bush had just declared war on Iraq. We all filed through the rain to a television so that we could watch him on Pearl TV dubbed over in Mandarin, breaking the news to the world. We all felt helpless and upset. It was pretty bad times.

Then again, so are these. Even though I was upset about the American election last week, I have been trying to have hope. I guess that's also my luxury, being out of the country at the moment. But I think that helps me have perspective, too. Being in China over the weekend made me realize again how privileged I am to be able to criticize my government anytime, anywhere, anyhow. And how far we've come that we even have the concept of "police brutality". The scariest part of the take-down I saw on that busy Guangzhou street was not the cops' overt (and excessive, I thought) use of force to subdue what appeared to be an unarmed man, but how all the bystanders just gathered to look in voyeuristic glee, or turned away in resignation.

(Then again, what would I have done had I seen this on the streets of L.A.? Probably the same thing. Nothing. But at least America has lawyers. Ahh, lawyers.)