If I learned anything in China, it’s that carny folk are the same the world over. It’s been a very long day scouring miles of market stalls, looking for deals I didn’t need, and I’m dog tired. My expat colleagues lead me from the massive four-story train station market, and we trek across the city, my arms loaded down with bags of Mao doodads and faux leather satchels.
As we stop to gaze upon another vast collection of semi-jade figurines, wallets, lighters, sunglasses, and countless heaps of scarves, a tiny woman motions to me from across the plaza. Behind her hang dozens of blue, yellow and pink balloons, and she beckons me to come hither, shouting at me in Mandarin. My five-day crash course in the local tongue hasn’t enabled me to decipher much, let alone why she singled me out.
Faster than I can say, “Gregory Peck and the defense of Hill 266,” I’m holding a plastic shotgun in my hand and firing at the balloons. “How much?” I ask, blasting away. She holds up two fingers. Two Yuan? That’s less than a nickel, and I’d try anything for a nickel. So I keep shooting.
For the next ten minutes I hit at least 75 balloons. At this point, Michael, my co-worker, eggs me on and I hit another 50 or so, the small woman staring passively over my shoulder as she pumps the twin-gauge toy gun, handing it to me in a rote muscle memory motion. Finally, with almost no balloons left and my hand cramping, I put the gun down. “How much was this?” Michael asks, and we look as the woman writes down, “200 x 2 = 400,” underlining the 400 for emphasis, holding out her palm in the universal carny sign for, “Pay up, moron.”
I don’t know much about China quite yet but enough to know that 400 Yuan is around $60, and I didn’t fly from Boston to New Jersey, New Jersey to Beijing, Beijing to Dalian, over 6000 miles across Canada, the frozen Arctic, through Russia and above Inner Mongolia to drop $63.50 on a classic midway canard. This is nuts. “This is nuts!” I shout. “Only 200 – that’s all I’m paying,” I say, holding up a peace sign that means anything but. The tiny woman’s voice grows shrill as a few people gather around. She bangs her finger down on the 400 figure. “I won’t pay it,” I say and then do what any cheapskate, embarrassed American would do – I throw down a 100 Yuan bill, beg Michael for another 100 and take off in a sad kind of speed walking stumble.
I’ve come to Dalian, China on business, my company setting up shop here a few months earlier, and despite the “misunderstanding” on the plaza, I think I’ve conducted myself well, straining to understand the language, accepting the ludicrous levels of service in the hotel and eating things I never would have ordered back in the States (sea sausage and seaweed, anyone?). I’ve learned to mutter the basics – “Good morning,” “Thank you,” “You’re welcome,” and my favorite, “Right On!” which is pronounced “DOO EEE,” exactly how Maury Finkel of Finkel Fixtures says it, Ben Stiller’s alter ego in the film version of Starsky and Hutch.
Dalian is a port city of six million on the northern coast of China. The city has more people than Houston, Chicago and almost two entire Bostons combined. Yet China refers to Dalian as a second-tier city, not fit to match the ranks of Shanghai, Beijing or Shenzhen. Here for almost ten days, I spend hours driving to all ends of Dalian, staring at the forests of half-built concrete towers that stretch to the horizon and the massive shipping container cranes in the harbors, like so many mutant red crabs poised to snap at unsuspecting passersby.
I make the very best of the nightlife Dalian offers, spending time in bars named “Brooklyn,” “Sisters,” and “Friends.” It’s at Friends where I meet the owner, Paul Collins from Hyde Park. About a decade ago, Paul set down roots in Dalian, fell in love with a local girl and now tries in vain to serve me homebrew hooch from one bottle and “snake juice” from another. I decline both, especially the one where the lifeless snake sits coiled, fermenting in the milky gray liquid. In the basement bar of my hotel, I witness New Visions, a drummerless cover band from the Philippine, crush a version of “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” Jesse, the band’s leader and keyboard player, attacks each stanza with vigor before telling me over a beer about his five kids and pregnant wife back home in Manila, a lonely look in his eyes.
One item apparent to the observant visitor is China’s attempt to generously translate most public signs into English. Phrases like “No Climbing. Thanks a Cooperation,” “Steam food of beautiful lake,” and the cryptically poetic, "Intention. Ten years of consistent,” abound, only to be joined by “Speaking cellphone is strictly prohibited when thunderstorm,” and the ever-relevant, “No Naked Flames.” My personal favorite is “Octopus Little Meatball,” a fair description of my physique after almost two weeks of bar-hopping.
On my one full day in Beijing, a city hard to describe other than it’s like the Los Angeles in Blade Runner except everyone’s either in a Bentley or on a bicycle, I take a guided trip to the Great Wall of China. I hadn’t believed the hype, thinking it was no more than a quaint stone outcropping, like Stonehenge. No. It’s massive, stretching across northern China for what seems like forever. Imagine a 30-foot high stone wall stretching from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon, only to loop back again, across hills, valleys, ravines, crevasses and countryside.
It’s pouring rain, and as I stand outside “The Great Wall of Handcraft Product Shop,” I notice the sign, “Heart cerebral disease sufferer ascend the Great Wall to please watch for.” I am please to watch for and spend the next hour hiking up the steep steps into the hazy rain, surrounded by hundreds of others doing the same. A group of Chinese men are laughing, running up to the Attila-facing wall and its crenellations, screaming out towards the long-gone Hun hordes. I join them and shriek away, and they burst out cheering – “Very good!” one of them yells. As I near the highest point, I slow down to take a photo, and I notice the graffiti. It’s everywhere a person can bend or reach to write his name - Chinese characters, names in many languages and simple cartoon figures.
And then I see it, written in everlasting white paint - “Shary Fuckin Vasco USA” with “China 2012” bookended by a heart and a smiley face. Ms. Vasco has taken the opportunity to leave her mark on this ancient structure, one of the world’s great wonders, and she’s done so with gusto. It’s one thing to write, “Shary was here” for eternity, but another to use your full name, date, country of origin, current mood, and favorite adjective. I’ve traveled to the other side of the planet, been exposed to this timeless culture, eaten things that will haunt my dreams (raw horsemeat and ocean critters, for example), walked in the footsteps of emperors and had my eyes opened to how big this world of ours really is only to be confronted by Shary’s scrawl like she was doodling in her remedial Civics notebook. I could have stayed in Newark if I’d wanted to see this.
Doesn’t she get it? I’m now a World Citizen! I have a passport with a real-live visa glued in it. I laughed with the German guys from VW, had lunch with someone from Malaysia and even shared a fruit plate with drunken Australians. As a newly christened Citizen of Planet Earth, I consider shouting an apology for Shary’s choice of self-expression. But even if I wanted to, no one really seems to care up here on the Wall, everyone’s too taken with the surroundings to notice.
I’ve since friended Shary on Facebook. She’s a young woman from New Jersey with dozens of photos of her school trip to China on her profile, and she seems perfectly nice and well-adjusted. Perhaps I’m the one who needs to rethink things. Maybe that’s what being a World Citizen is all about – leaving a little image of yourself in a new place so a stranger on the other side of the world may learn more about you. Even if the adjectives don’t translate. Doo eee, Shary Vasco! Doo eee!
As we stop to gaze upon another vast collection of semi-jade figurines, wallets, lighters, sunglasses, and countless heaps of scarves, a tiny woman motions to me from across the plaza. Behind her hang dozens of blue, yellow and pink balloons, and she beckons me to come hither, shouting at me in Mandarin. My five-day crash course in the local tongue hasn’t enabled me to decipher much, let alone why she singled me out.
Faster than I can say, “Gregory Peck and the defense of Hill 266,” I’m holding a plastic shotgun in my hand and firing at the balloons. “How much?” I ask, blasting away. She holds up two fingers. Two Yuan? That’s less than a nickel, and I’d try anything for a nickel. So I keep shooting.
For the next ten minutes I hit at least 75 balloons. At this point, Michael, my co-worker, eggs me on and I hit another 50 or so, the small woman staring passively over my shoulder as she pumps the twin-gauge toy gun, handing it to me in a rote muscle memory motion. Finally, with almost no balloons left and my hand cramping, I put the gun down. “How much was this?” Michael asks, and we look as the woman writes down, “200 x 2 = 400,” underlining the 400 for emphasis, holding out her palm in the universal carny sign for, “Pay up, moron.”
I don’t know much about China quite yet but enough to know that 400 Yuan is around $60, and I didn’t fly from Boston to New Jersey, New Jersey to Beijing, Beijing to Dalian, over 6000 miles across Canada, the frozen Arctic, through Russia and above Inner Mongolia to drop $63.50 on a classic midway canard. This is nuts. “This is nuts!” I shout. “Only 200 – that’s all I’m paying,” I say, holding up a peace sign that means anything but. The tiny woman’s voice grows shrill as a few people gather around. She bangs her finger down on the 400 figure. “I won’t pay it,” I say and then do what any cheapskate, embarrassed American would do – I throw down a 100 Yuan bill, beg Michael for another 100 and take off in a sad kind of speed walking stumble.
I’ve come to Dalian, China on business, my company setting up shop here a few months earlier, and despite the “misunderstanding” on the plaza, I think I’ve conducted myself well, straining to understand the language, accepting the ludicrous levels of service in the hotel and eating things I never would have ordered back in the States (sea sausage and seaweed, anyone?). I’ve learned to mutter the basics – “Good morning,” “Thank you,” “You’re welcome,” and my favorite, “Right On!” which is pronounced “DOO EEE,” exactly how Maury Finkel of Finkel Fixtures says it, Ben Stiller’s alter ego in the film version of Starsky and Hutch.
Dalian is a port city of six million on the northern coast of China. The city has more people than Houston, Chicago and almost two entire Bostons combined. Yet China refers to Dalian as a second-tier city, not fit to match the ranks of Shanghai, Beijing or Shenzhen. Here for almost ten days, I spend hours driving to all ends of Dalian, staring at the forests of half-built concrete towers that stretch to the horizon and the massive shipping container cranes in the harbors, like so many mutant red crabs poised to snap at unsuspecting passersby.
I make the very best of the nightlife Dalian offers, spending time in bars named “Brooklyn,” “Sisters,” and “Friends.” It’s at Friends where I meet the owner, Paul Collins from Hyde Park. About a decade ago, Paul set down roots in Dalian, fell in love with a local girl and now tries in vain to serve me homebrew hooch from one bottle and “snake juice” from another. I decline both, especially the one where the lifeless snake sits coiled, fermenting in the milky gray liquid. In the basement bar of my hotel, I witness New Visions, a drummerless cover band from the Philippine, crush a version of “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” Jesse, the band’s leader and keyboard player, attacks each stanza with vigor before telling me over a beer about his five kids and pregnant wife back home in Manila, a lonely look in his eyes.
One item apparent to the observant visitor is China’s attempt to generously translate most public signs into English. Phrases like “No Climbing. Thanks a Cooperation,” “Steam food of beautiful lake,” and the cryptically poetic, "Intention. Ten years of consistent,” abound, only to be joined by “Speaking cellphone is strictly prohibited when thunderstorm,” and the ever-relevant, “No Naked Flames.” My personal favorite is “Octopus Little Meatball,” a fair description of my physique after almost two weeks of bar-hopping.
On my one full day in Beijing, a city hard to describe other than it’s like the Los Angeles in Blade Runner except everyone’s either in a Bentley or on a bicycle, I take a guided trip to the Great Wall of China. I hadn’t believed the hype, thinking it was no more than a quaint stone outcropping, like Stonehenge. No. It’s massive, stretching across northern China for what seems like forever. Imagine a 30-foot high stone wall stretching from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon, only to loop back again, across hills, valleys, ravines, crevasses and countryside.
It’s pouring rain, and as I stand outside “The Great Wall of Handcraft Product Shop,” I notice the sign, “Heart cerebral disease sufferer ascend the Great Wall to please watch for.” I am please to watch for and spend the next hour hiking up the steep steps into the hazy rain, surrounded by hundreds of others doing the same. A group of Chinese men are laughing, running up to the Attila-facing wall and its crenellations, screaming out towards the long-gone Hun hordes. I join them and shriek away, and they burst out cheering – “Very good!” one of them yells. As I near the highest point, I slow down to take a photo, and I notice the graffiti. It’s everywhere a person can bend or reach to write his name - Chinese characters, names in many languages and simple cartoon figures.
And then I see it, written in everlasting white paint - “Shary Fuckin Vasco USA” with “China 2012” bookended by a heart and a smiley face. Ms. Vasco has taken the opportunity to leave her mark on this ancient structure, one of the world’s great wonders, and she’s done so with gusto. It’s one thing to write, “Shary was here” for eternity, but another to use your full name, date, country of origin, current mood, and favorite adjective. I’ve traveled to the other side of the planet, been exposed to this timeless culture, eaten things that will haunt my dreams (raw horsemeat and ocean critters, for example), walked in the footsteps of emperors and had my eyes opened to how big this world of ours really is only to be confronted by Shary’s scrawl like she was doodling in her remedial Civics notebook. I could have stayed in Newark if I’d wanted to see this.
Doesn’t she get it? I’m now a World Citizen! I have a passport with a real-live visa glued in it. I laughed with the German guys from VW, had lunch with someone from Malaysia and even shared a fruit plate with drunken Australians. As a newly christened Citizen of Planet Earth, I consider shouting an apology for Shary’s choice of self-expression. But even if I wanted to, no one really seems to care up here on the Wall, everyone’s too taken with the surroundings to notice.
I’ve since friended Shary on Facebook. She’s a young woman from New Jersey with dozens of photos of her school trip to China on her profile, and she seems perfectly nice and well-adjusted. Perhaps I’m the one who needs to rethink things. Maybe that’s what being a World Citizen is all about – leaving a little image of yourself in a new place so a stranger on the other side of the world may learn more about you. Even if the adjectives don’t translate. Doo eee, Shary Vasco! Doo eee!
