Have you ever heard of China? No, really, I’m not trying to be funny. The funny part will come at the end, though I’ll try to keep it frisky all the way through. When I think of what China is today – a country to be reckoned with, constantly in the news – and what it was in the 1960s, when I was growing up, I’m amazed, speechless really, at the profound changes that have taken place in this crazy world in my lifetime. Yes, of course, everyone has heard of China and the Chinese people, who have been around since Adam and Eve, maybe even longer, but in the sixties China was on the dark side of the moon, much more so than North Korea is today. For this inquisitive youngster there was always a tantalizing mystery about it. What was going on there? Who was this Mao Tse-tung character and what did he believe in? Once or twice I’d heard about the Great Leap Forward, some kind of ambitious social project, and it seemed the government there intensely hated America, but it was all a head-scratcher, kept that way by our crypto-communist news media, which occasionally hinted that China was making some real progress.
I now know – or maybe I should say I’m 95% certain – that for twenty years or more, including the entire 1960s decade, China was hell on earth. Historians disagree as to who was the greatest killer of all time, Joseph Stalin or Mao – neither of whom, incidentally, could’ve risen to or stayed in power without the support of Washington D.C., but it doesn’t matter much who was #1 and who #2.
Chairman Mao was not a nice man. One difference between the two, who were close pals, was that, from what I can gather at least, Mao did not purposely work tens of millions to death. It’s just that his harebrained scheme of rapidly industrializing a rural nation, as embodied in the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1962, caused people to die like flies anyway, mostly of starvation, though perhaps ten percent were murdered by their communist overlords for not doing their jobs well. It was the worst manmade famine ever, with the most conservative estimate being 20 million dead.
Incidentally, to avoid confusion, if you’re a lot younger than me you may only know about Mao Zedong. That’s because thirty or forty years ago some joker changed the spelling from Tse-tung to Zedong, and it stuck. Where he got the authority to do this I have no idea, but it’s the same guy. I prefer Tse-tung because, well, it sounds more Chinese.
February 1972 was a turning point which came out of nowhere. That was when President Richard Nixon met with Mao in Beijing (then called Peking) and the sight of them on the TV screen sitting together and amiably chatting was both pleasant and astonishing. It reassured me that yes, China really did exist on the other side of this distressed planet. As I later learned, Nixon’s vile secretary of state Henry Kissinger was the real force behind this historic schmooze, and opening up trade was a major part of it. It may sound strange to younger readers, but up until then, and for some years afterward, absolutely nothing you could buy or use was made in China. Now it seems like everything is, and predatory chinks now own American farmland, hotels, food processing plants, entertainment firms, and they’re especially big in the field of technology. But this is supposed to be a travel story so let me put that aside.
Mao died in 1976, and as with the passing of most communist butchers, there was a scrambling for power and reforms followed. Life became easier for most Chinese, and we learned a lot more about the country than in years past, though the door would remain closed to foreign tourists until the 1980s.
China was never high on my wish list, but I was curious about the place and eventually went there twice on a tourist visa, the first time on a small, organized group tour in 2007 to the far west, and the second time on my own, in 2013, getting around on public transportation after crossing the border from Vietnam. My total time in China was about three weeks, not much, to be sure, but enough to get a feel for daily life there. Geographically, China resembles the U.S. in that it’s huge – somewhat larger than the contiguous 48 states – and its eastern and southeastern edges border the ocean, though of course there’s a hell of a lot more people, more than a billion more, putting it just behind India in that unenviable department. The western half, roughly, is completely different in character and much more sparsely populated, and there’s no sea, just a lot of land bordering many countries, including five of the seven Stans. But if you were to slice off the coastal areas of California, Oregon and Washington, it would be much like the American west in terms of desert, mountains, and open space.
Getting a tourist visa to visit China is a pain in the ass. For U.S. citizens, most Asian countries require a visa obtained at a foreign embassy, and China is no exception, but as I recall there was a lot more to fill out on the application form. If you need a visa before leaving home, the way it usually works, if you want to play it safe, is that you mail your passport and application to a visa service in Washington D.C. where all the embassies are located, and let them run around and take care of it. But many United Nations consulates, China included, also issue visas, and since I lived on Long Island, just an hour from Manhattan by train, that was the obvious choice. Just drop off the passport, pay the fee, and come back and pick it up in a week or less. But on the ‘net I’d read numerous horror stories about the Chinese consulate to the effect that they were extremely rude and uncooperative, sometimes, for example, telling you to come back tomorrow and shutting the window in your face. Who needs that? I looked around and found a travel agency called Golden Day Tours that did the visa legwork. It was run by two Chinese women out of a small office near the top of a skyscraper in midtown Manhattan. For fifty bucks let them deal with this nonsense. I used them for both of my trips and it worked out fine.
My first trip to China began in Almaty, the capital of neighboring Kazakhstan, where I’d arrived at 2AM local time on Turkish Airlines after 23 hours in transit departing New York with a six-hour layover in Istanbul. I was zonked out of my shorts, but my eyes widened when I saw a female customs official with blonde hair and slanty eyes, the first time I’d seen anything so freakish. This has nothing to do with my story here, but there are things I never forget that are worth mentioning. Anyway, it was an 18-day trip, a big loop ending in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, entirely by road, the way I like it, with half the time in China’s far western Xinjiang Province. Despite the exotic name and remote location, Kazakhstan was rather non-descript and the border crossing, though fairly busy, was boring, which bummed me out because border crossings are usually good for a story, but not this one.
Again, this part of China is totally different from everything we associate with the country. I had no idea that the Takamaklan Desert, part of which we drove through, was nearly as big as Montana. I’d never even heard of it until we got there. We visited a cave complex where there were a thousand illustrations of Buddha, which didn’t exactly float my boat. Nor did a lake called Heaven, or something like that. But there were a few things of interest. This is the only place in the world where I saw bactrian camels, the kind with two humps, and there were quite a few of them. There were also a lot of Uyghurs, followers of Islam who have more rounded eyes and are obviously not Chinese, though I really don’t know what they are, racially speaking. You may have heard about them because the Chinese don’t like them and have been doing some serious ethnic cleansing, kind of like what they’ve been doing in Tibet the last seventy years. By rights, the hotel we stayed at in Kashgar (Kashi on some maps) should’ve been run by Uyghurs, but the entire staff was Han Chinese, Han being the proper designation for the Chinese race. Kashgar was the only town of any size that we stayed in, and was fairly interesting, especially some of the house architecture and distinctive doors. What I liked best was the feeling of remoteness, the fact that so few outsiders come here, and that we were following one of the routes of the Silk Road that connected Europe and China in the Middle Ages.
We came upon the scene of a bad car accident involving two vehicles in the middle of nowhere. Three women were lying on blankets by the roadside. I couldn’t tell if they were dead or just taking a nap, but there was no blood or other signs of injury so I guess they were asleep. Either way, they were in for a long wait. The Chinese driver of our minibus didn’t bother stopping to check on them. It’s the uncaring Chinese way. Twice, also, we were delayed by landslides. There were bulldozers and other heavy equipment clearing the road. One of my companions snapped a photo; a worker shouted at him. For me, the highlight of the trip by far was driving to the Kyrgyzstan border. Talk about a lonely road. About the last hundred miles was a wide dirt track, and the only other vehicles we occasionally saw going the other way were dilapidated trucks loaded with scrap metal, the commerce of which still puzzles me. There were no other signs of life on this high plateau. You don’t want to run out of gas here.
Torugart Pass marks the boundary, and it was one of the most enchantingly remote borders I’ve ever crossed. The customs post on the Kyrgyzstan side was a battered old building in a Stalinist time warp, and I half expected to see a picture of Uncle Joe on the wall, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan having been part of the old Soviet Union before it imploded. There were snowy Himalayan peaks in the 17,000 feet range and barbed wire all over the place. I guessed that the barbed wire was a relic of the bad old days, when China and Russia were at each other’s throats and there were border skirmishes, real shooting with casualties. I remember those days in the 1970s. I remember feeling relieved that the lie of communism was running into the brick wall of reality, meaning nationalism, and it couldn’t possibly succeed as a unified international movement. That’s all in the past, of course, because these days, as everyone knows, China and Russia are bosom buddies and it has nothing to do with Marxist claptrap. It’s one more way the world has dramatically changed in the last fifty years.
Vietnam, which sits on China’s south, also had some bad neighbor problems in the seventies, with sporadic gunfire along the border. The hostility between V and C goes back to primordial times. By 2013, however, things had simmered down. I know this because I took the twice-weekly public bus from Hanoi to Nanning, the first big Chinese city on this, the main route, and there was a sign with the word “friendship” in English at the border. The border crossing itself wasn’t all that exciting – certainly nothing like the dreamy remoteness of entering Kyrgyzstan – but I do remember it because of the unusually nasty female official on the Chinese side. The bus was nearly full with Chinese and Vietnamese passengers – I couldn’t tell them apart – and after completing routine formalities on the Vietnamese side, everyone got off and went into the small customs building inside China. There seemed to be just this one woman in charge. She thrusted her arms out parallel, barking at everyone to form a single line. When my turn came to hand over my passport, she angrily gestured for me to take off my baseball cap. God, what a bitch. I was afraid she’d come up with a reason to refuse me entry, but she stamped my passport and I was on my way.
Nanning is just another one of those Chinese ant colonies, a big city of no interest, but I had to go there to catch another bus to my destination, Guilin, a much smaller city. This was easy enough, and after just an hour’s wait, we left around dusk. Looking at the map I figured we’d arrive in Guilin at six or seven in the morning. I’ve never liked overnight bus rides because it’s impossible to get a good night’s sleep, but sometimes there’s no choice, it’s part of the adventure, and at least I didn’t have to worry about finding accommodation. But I had badly miscalculated the distance, and we pulled into Guilin around 1:30, stopping in a large square where everyone got off and went their separate ways. So there I was in this big deserted square which was lit by streetlamps, but there was nothing to sit on, no bench, nothing but the curb. Soon a man approached me, saying, “Hotel?” I hadn’t given this any thought so I blew him off and he walked away, disappearing down an alley, only to reappear a few minutes later, after I had reconsidered my situation. He said something, which of course I didn’t understand, but I’m sure it was “What’s wrong with you? You can’t stay here all night.” He was right. What was I supposed to do, lie down on the pavement for five hours? So this time I let him lead me down the same dark, narrow alley, thinking, “What am I getting myself into here?” After walking a hundred yards I followed him through a door. There was no sign, but it was a hotel, if you can call it that. He made a copy of my passport by a lamp on his desk, gave me a key, and said, “Woman?” I smiled and shook my head. I unlocked a door to the tiniest room I have ever slept in. Basically, it was a prison cell. There was a thin mattress on a bamboo frame, a light bulb, an overhead fan, and a pit toilet with a showerhead directly above it, so you could take a shit and a shower at the same time if you were so inclined. Everything worked, I got five hours of sleep, and it only cost eight bucks. No complaints.
Every guidebook to China is as thick as a brick and weighs just as much, so instead of lugging one around, I’d photocopied about twenty pages of all that I needed from a guidebook at my local library before leaving home. From this I’d picked out the Jinjiang Guest House, which seemed like my kind of place, a cheap hotel popular with travelers. With my backpack strapped on, I was trying to get my bearings early in the morning when a man on a motorcycle pulled alongside me and said, “Hotel?” Without thinking I nodded and he patted the seat behind him. I got on and off we went. He took me to a hotel which looked inexpensive from the outside, but was problematic on the inside. The place catered to locals; no one at the reception desk spoke English. I’d made the mistake of staying at such a hotel for three nights in Hanoi. Not that it was unfriendly or dangerous or anything like that, it’s just that there was no communication, which gave me an empty feeling. If possible, I’d much rather stay at a hotel where the staff speaks English and where other foreign travelers stay. I always enjoyed meeting other independent travelers – most of whom, in my experience, were British or German – and swapping stories or advice, going out for a beer or a meal, sometimes traveling together for a day or two.
I walked out, which didn’t make the motorcycle man too happy; he lost out on his commission. He yelled at me and of course I had no idea what he was saying. Maybe he wanted to be paid for his taxi service but I refused to give him any money because he didn’t deserve it. In fact, he’d gotten me more lost. I don’t remember how I got to the Jinjiang, but I did find it, English was spoken, they had vacancy, and I checked in for two nights.
I came to Guilin because I’d seen photos of the magnificent scenery along the Li River, which skirts this manageable city. The thing to do here is sail down the Li on a small, motorized bamboo raft or a cruise ship. This was easy to arrange right at the reception desk, so I booked myself a raft for the next day, which included transport from the guest house to the pier, a little way out of town. There was a check-in office by the pier, pretty crowded, plenty of chairs and tables, where you had to wait for the next available raft. Solo travelers were required to find someone to pair up with. Seated near me by herself was a petite woman around my age who was still living in the hippie era, wearing a tie-dyed shirt and long earrings. Not my cup of tea, but it was an immediate solution, so I asked her if she wanted to be my raft mate. She smiled and said sure. She was French. Waiting time was about an hour, there were snacks and beverages for sale, and it was hot out. I felt like having a beer and offered to buy her one. “I don’t drink,” she said. “I do weed.” I just looked at her, thinking, “Are you crazy, messing around with illegal drugs in a country like China?” She misread me. “Weed,” she said. “You know, marijuana.” “I know what weed is.” Now I liked her even less and wished I had picked someone else.
But sometimes you have to overlook flaws in people. Once we were on the water I scolded myself for prejudging her. Giselle was a delightful companion and an interesting woman who had traveled the world alone, including some countries in Africa where very few have ventured. Chad, for God sakes! That takes guts. She spent six months each year traveling and six months living with her boyfriend in Ohio. At least that’s what she told me and I believe she was honest. I enjoyed listening to her perspective on America, the good and the bad. The scenery – limestone karsts rising everywhere along the river – was jaw-dropping, otherworldly, as spectacular in its own way as anything the American West can offer. Giselle filmed them with her tablet as we chatted, occasionally interrupting herself with little girl sighs of wonder. There was a mosquito fleet of rafts puttering around, and we were one of those that came uncomfortably close to a huge cruise ship that came gliding through. There were no life jackets, of course, safety measures be damned in these damn countries.
The cormorant is a bird trained to catch fairly large fish that feed Chinese families. There are some fascinating YouTube videos where you can watch them doing their thing. Part of the raft trip package was a demonstration of this by the operator, and also a beaching of the raft at a certain spot to walk ashore and see something that was supposed to be interesting but I forget what it was. Our raft man had his cormorant pluck a fish the size of a guppy out of the river. Both diversions took only a minute or two. It was very hokey, and typical of Chinese deception and rip-off culture, but sometimes you have to sit back and enjoy the hokeyness of it all. It really was a fun and satisfying day. I have fond memories of Giselle and I’ll never forget that awesome scenery.
Working my way north to Beijing, I took the 27-hour “hard class” train from Guilin to Xi’an. I wanted a sleeping berth but they were sold out so I had no choice. A long train ride in hard class in China must be worse than riding the rails to Auschwitz in 1943. I’ll have to talk to a Holocaust survivor about that. I can’t think of a more miserable experience, which ended at 9:30 PM in the pouring rain in Xi’an, and being told at the only hotel I knew about from my pages that there were no rooms available. Thank Confucius I was able to sleep on the top of a bunk bed in a dorm room with three passive Chinese students, one of whom read by a small lamp and ate potato chips till 2AM. I tell this story in detail on my “Travel is my Lifeblood” page, so I won’t repeat it here, other than to mention that the terracotta warriors, Xi’an’s drawing card, accidentally unearthed by farmers in 1974, which made a huge splash in the media at the time, disappointed me, though such impressions are purely subjective. Maybe you saw them on their world tour or even in China and were blown away by them. To each his own.
I took the recently inaugurated bullet train from Xi’an to Beijing, which covers nearly 700 miles in five hours. For peace of mind, before leaving home I had surfed the ‘net and chose the Kings Joy Hotel, where I made reservations for four nights. Beijing was where my trip to North Korea began with a 90-minute flight to Pyongyang, but of course it’s the Chinese capital which everyone knows about so I figured I’d have a look. But first things first: it’s just a two-hour bus ride from here to the Great Wall of China, and who in his right mind would come this far and not visit this iconic sight? The Kings Joy turned out to be an excellent budget hotel, just $32 a night, great location, with the simple things I needed, including a tour desk where I was able to book a full-day trip to the Great Wall the next day. The others were mostly Chinese, with some foreign tourists in the mix. Along with the Li River raft ride, it was the best thing I did on this trip. As expected, there were hordes of visitors walking on this, the popular Mutianyu section of the wall, much of which has been repaired to look like what you’ve seen in all those photographs. Most of the original wall are crumbling ruins. Construction took several centuries, but when you think about it, it was quite a feat to build a wall 13,170 miles long just to keep nomadic invaders out. For all their flaws, the Chinese have done some incredible things. (But hold on a minute, 13,170 miles is more than half the earth’s circumference, so how can it be that long? Well, that’s what Wikipedia says, so it must be true.)
I had two more days to kill in Beijing which, with a population of 22 million, is the world’s second largest metropolis after Shanghai. It’s a sterile, endlessly sprawling city with only a few points of interest. It’s also notorious for its air pollution, but I never experienced it. Maybe I just got lucky for the time I was there. Actually, there’s only one place in the world where the air pollution really bothered me, where it was so unhealthy that it almost hurt to breathe. That place was Mexico City.
The Kings Joy was within walking distance of Tiananmen Square, which became world famous in 1989 with scenes of mass turmoil, lasting several weeks, and culminating in an army massacre of demonstrating students, and also by the riveting photograph of “Tank Man,” one lone rebel facing down brute force by standing in the way of an advancing tank. That was the media message, anyway, so it was probably a lot of baloney. I shouldn’t say that, because I really don’t know what the demonstrations were about, nor do I care, any more than a Chinese coolie should care about J6. This is the world’s largest square, and I’ve never seen so many closed circuit TV cameras in one area. It’s surrounded by things to see, one of which is the Forbidden City, the old imperial palace of China and the heart and soul of the country which is now a museum complex so vast that it would take a whole month to see all of it. I was there for two hours so I’m hardly qualified to write about it. Instead I’ll tell you about the Chinese guy who approached me shortly after I left. “What your country?” he said. “America.” “Ah, America. Good country.” “Thank you.” “You like art?” “Yeah.” “You want to meet art teacher? Nice lady.” “No thanks.”
On the opposite side of Tiananmen Square is a huge hall where Mao Tse-tung lies in state. There was a long line here, and it required an online reservation to get inside. I didn’t bother because this confused me, so I never got to see Mao’s pickled remains. Actually, I’d done this before. In 1980, while in Moscow, I visited Lenin’s tomb, open to the public. The old monster looked pretty good for having been dead 56 years, right down to his grubby beard, just the way he looks in those photos taken during the Bolshevik revolution. A week earlier I saw Ho Chi Minh up close in his mausoleum in Hanoi and he looked dapper too. A week later I’d be seeing Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il in Pyongyang, grandfather and father, respectively, of current leader Kim Jong-Un. Boy, that was an experience. You had to go right up to the glass and bow four times, at their heads, feet, right side, left side. Photography of any of these gentlemen is absolutely forbidden, practically under penalty of death, but you can find photos of them resting in peace on the internet. Once a year an expert comes by and takes the bodies to a laboratory where they’re dusted off and given a formaldehyde booster shot, then slid back into their glass cases so that people can gawk at them forever.
I spent the rest of the day within the city limits. My map showed many small attractions, in name anyway, and I decided to check out the military museum. To get there I had to take the subway, which covers an enormous area, but it’s so easy to navigate, a child can handle it. Signs are in Chinese and English, and to my amazement, the first announcement as the train approached each station was in English, Chinese second. But I couldn’t find the damn museum, the sign of which was probably in Chinese characters only, and passersby were of no help, so I got back on the subway and rode it back to the vicinity of my hotel, having decided to explore the Hutong district. But first I had to change money at a bank, dollars into yuan. This was the last time I brought American Express travelers checks on a trip. Remember them? If you’re young, you surely don’t, but back in the day they were the safest way to take money abroad. I was in that damn bank for nearly an hour. They bounced me around from window to window to get this signed, that signed, always asking to see my passport. Sheesh.
Hutong is supposed to be the real deal, nothing touristy about it, just the cramped quarters in Beijing where millions crawl through the mud of life, a maze of alleys and courtyards where it’s impossible not to get lost, but eventually you’ll end up on a main street, so nothing to worry about. For me it was no quainter than a suburban neighborhood back home. Hardly anything worth a photograph. I saw what looked like a public toilet, with the familiar sign of a male figure. I had to pee so I walked in, and as soon as I did I saw three men squatting over separate holes. Two were reading a newspaper and the third was looking at his phone. There was no privacy and they paid no attention to me. Like I said, the real deal. I spent the rest of the day wandering around the area near my hotel. As in every Chinese city, there were too many people but it was pleasant nonetheless – little shops, restaurants, souvenir stores, things to keep your senses occupied. I bought a few small souvenirs. Life seemed pretty good under revamped communism, if I can call it that. I can only imagine how bleak it was under Mao.
I had one full day left in Beijing, so I browsed the tourist pamphlets in the Kings Joy lobby. I hit upon a full day excursion to an historical shrine of some sort, a good distance out of the city, for which I was able to book a seat on a bus with pick-up at the hotel at seven the next morning. What I didn’t know was that it was a place that attracted only Chinese folks, and I found myself the only foreigner on the packed bus. Whatever the place was, it was quite forgettable, and the proof of that is that I’ve forgotten everything about it except that it covered a large area and there were some pagodas. I remember the experience for an entirely different reason. I somehow connected with the people sitting in front of me – a boy of about seven, his mother, and grandmother. The language barrier was total, but using his iPhone the boy translated some words back and forth between English and Chinese, and we had fun with that. I also gave him some American coins as souvenirs, which I’ve found always delights people, young and old. When we arrived at our destination, they kind of adopted me. We explored the place together, had a snack at a table together, took a few photos of each other. At some point we drifted apart and I lost sight of them among the gazillions of Chinese who were roaming the grounds. There had to be forty buses in the parking lot, all of them pretty much looked the same, and I hadn’t made a mental note of anything that distinguished our bus, like the license plate number. I was lost in a Chinese ocean, and even if I found someone who spoke English, what good would that do? How would I find my bus, get back to Beijing, and how did I even know which buses had come from Beijing? I nearly panicked. In fact, I did panic! I didn’t know what to do. Then, miraculously, among the swarms of visitors dressed in bright colors, I spotted Grandma in the distance, who was wearing a distinctive blouse, little black flowers on a white background. I rushed over to them, and she and her daughter were almost as happy as I was to be reunited. I stuck by their side till we were back on the bus.
I tell this story to illustrate that there are some goodhearted Chinese people out there, but most of them really aren’t – not that they’re all that bad either. Actually, I’m not entitled to an informed opinion because I’ve had very few interactions with them in the U.S., other than picking up an order of chop suey, shrimp with lobster sauce, or whatever. The ones I’ve dealt with at home, as in China, are generally polite in a quiet way. I have nothing against them but nothing for them either. I see them simply as alien rivals for the resources of the planet, and if they get the better of the White man, selling us most of our manufactured junk, moving into our countries and setting up shop and taking over, you can’t blame them for our failure to act against them on our own behalf. The European powers smacked them around pretty good in the nineteenth century, so I suppose there’s a revenge factor at play.
For all its huge size and ancient history, China just isn’t that interesting, not to me anyway. If you want a taste of the exotic Far East, go elsewhere. Then again, there was a British guy I met on my first trip who had been to Yunnan Province, which borders Laos, Vietnam, and mostly Burma (Myanmar), and he said it was quite fascinating. I think he was there for one of the many festivals that take place among the various ethnic groups in that region. That seems like a good reason to visit. But I’d hate to be in China if something like the global Covid hoax comes along again. I doubt that any government on earth imposed such draconian lockdown measures. In some cases, the entrance doors to apartment buildings were welded shut to keep people inside. Many literally starved because they could not shop and there were no food deliveries. When people did get out there were violent clashes with the army and medicrats dressed in those creepy white spacesuits. Three years ago, in my article “What’s up with China?”, I posted photographs of desperate people who had hanged themselves and videos of people jumping from the rooftops of apartment buildings. And of course China is always at the forefront of high-tech surveillance and control. I recall reading a story about an Australian guy who got trapped there during Covid and had fallen victim to the contact tracing insanity. He had taken one of those farcical Covid tests and tested negative, but his smart phone revealed his location and the fact that he had been near a citizen who had tested positive. As a result he was forcibly taken to a quarantine facility, and if I remember correctly, held there for a month, undergoing daily bogus tests for Covid infection. What a nightmare.
In that same blog post of April 30, 2022 I mentioned a book, Ways That Are Dark, published in 1933. It was written by Ralph Townsend, an American career diplomat who was stationed in China for well over a year and knew the country intimately. Townsend greatly admired the Japanese, in contrast to the Chinese, whom he characterized as a lying, cheating, scheming race, a charge he backed up with personal anecdotes. He truly despised the Chinese and made no attempt to hide his feelings. The book was reprinted in 1997, with a foreword by racial nationalist Willis Carto. I quoted a passage in the aforementioned post, which I’ll expand a bit here:
Townsend wrote before the communist era. During the past five decades the Chinese Reds have murdered some 100 million of their own people by shooting, hanging, stomping, dragging, squashing, sawing, slicing, or starving them to death. This toll, which indicts the Marxist-Leninist political system, more broadly indicts Chinese culture itself because the rulers of China for fifty centuries have always freely murdered and tortured their hapless subjects…. But, like it or not, China is a major player in the world today and so will it remain not only for the next 64 years but into the unknowable future. And there is no reason to believe that China will change, none at all….
I have to agree that, in spite of some bright spots, the Chinese have some repugnant traits. It must be a genetic thing. How else can you explain their behavior? As Townsend pointed out, one of these traits is no sense of community, that is, outside of their family units an utter lack of concern for their fellow man. This was on full display when I read, back in August 2010, about a traffic jam the likes of which the world has never seen, and may not see again. Cars and trucks on a 62-mile stretch of highway connecting Beijing with Tibet came to a standstill for twelve days – twelve days! – stranding tens of thousands of motorists. Did their countrymen – locals living along the route – make a small sacrifice to help them? Think again. They showed up to cash in on their misfortune, selling water and basic food items at exorbitant prices, in some cases charging fifteen times the regular price for a bottle of water. Pay up or die of thirst. If true – and I have no reason to question it – it validates everything Townsend wrote about. And that isn’t their only character defect. It really takes a lack of foresight to allow a disaster like that to happen, not to mention the dangerous pollution levels in the large cities, and the unsustainable population. No wonder they want to colonize the White man’s lands.
But I’ve lost sight of what prompted me to write this in the first place, and as is my habit, went off on too many tangents, though I trust you’ve learned a few things. I began writing this because I came across a website, boredpanda.com, that makes fun of the bizarre items offered in restaurants that tourists frequent in China. It reminded me of how I chuckled while reading the menus of the restaurants I sampled in the country, though all these years later I remember only one misnamed dish: photo meatballs. So I can attest that bored panda is not making this stuff up, and that’s further proven by the screen shots they posted from actual menus in China. Should you go there, here’s what you might be ordering: McDonald’s best friend; You and your family; Spicy Jew’s ear; Mr. Oyster; Fuck the duck until exploded; Whatever; Various and confused pizzas; Germany sexual harassment; Meat muscle stupid bean sprouts; Fries pulls out the rotten child; Our sweet ass; Acid beans meat respiratory droplets; Husband and wife lung slice; Hang small children sauce; The concept of head; Potatoes kelp of burning flesh; Suck that leisure rod; Boiled cabbage farmers; Orchid Zhou knife cut face; Characteristics of mouth watering; Pissing beef ball; Stir-fried Wikipedia; Old adopted mother money belly; The hand grasps the beef; Many bandits; Simmer chicken cloud ear; Sixi roasted husband; Meat fried cat ear; Potato the crap; Sandwich with dried meat floss.
Clearly, something was lost in the translation. Maybe they just need a new app. And to be honest, most listed entrees, where they appear in English, are edible and understandable. And who am I, not fluent in any foreign language, to make fun of bungled translations, especially from a language as esoteric as Mandarin Chinese?
As an aside, we all know that the Chinese have a reputation for eating things that horrify us, not only cats and dogs, but weird animals like bats and pangolins. I’ve even seen a credible photograph of a Chinaman slurping soup with a human fetus in it. I can only say that, while I don’t doubt these peculiar tastes, I never saw anything that shocked me in a restaurant, nor in the few markets I stopped at. I did become slightly ill once, but it only lasted a day, and all in all the food was pretty good and fairly hygienic, certainly miles ahead of India, the only other country where more than a billion people live, and which has long had pissy relations with China because of China’s close ties with Pakistan. But here I go again, off on a tangent.
Actually, as a connoisseur of Chinese food, I must say that it’s better here than over there. And I’m not the only who loves it. I always get a kick out of seeing at least one Chinese take-out joint in just about every town in America, even really small towns where you often can’t get any other foreign cuisine. The Chinese have had a rocky history here until fairly recently. Now, as land and business owners, they often call the shots right here on our own soil. Something has to be done about that. If European man ever reclaims this country, I, for one, am in favor of allowing one Chinese take-out kitchen per town, and that’s it. That’s pretty much what it was like when I was a kid. Just, please, no children sauce or husband and wife lungs or exploding ducks on the menu.