The Driver Ms. Daisy

BEIJING — Call me sexist, but I always choose female taxi drivers.

I will cross a street, jump a fence or break the taxi line to give a female drive some business. I don't hate male drivers, but it's a rare day I see a woman behind the wheel in Asia, and on those days I want to talk.

I found my latest conversation in front of a noodle stand in Zhongguancun. I tapped on her window and waved; the driver sheepishly stuffed a bun between the seat and the window. All Beijing taxis have a list of regulations that patrons should expect in the cab, no eating is on the list.

I got in and started chowing a bowl of noodles and sesame sauce.

"You can't eat in the cabin," she said.

"I just saw you eat in here. Don't worry I'm a clean person." We both laughed at the joke, and from there the beats of our conversation proceeded regularly.

"When did you start driving?"

"A cab? In 2000."

"Seven years now. Nice. When did get this car?"

"About two years ago."

Beijing's taxi fleet changed from Xiali rust buckets to modern Chinese made cars in preparation for the Olympics. The cars were switched quickly; a few months after their introduction it was hard to find model that dominated the capital's streets for over a decade. I wonder what happened to the old car; had she or the cab company sold it?

"No," she said. "They used it for parts."

Perhaps this green-and-yellow automobile contained an old Xiali carburetor under the hood. Perhaps not.

What I can say is that this driver, Ms. Zhao, brought me to Tsinghua University with a minimum of fuss, in a clean cab with pleasant conversation. As a representative of the small but growing class of female drivers, she did well.

Just a Number

BEIJING — In Zijing Dormitory No. 20 I am friends with a fuyuan. Her name is No. 137.

This name did not come at birth, rather it was assigned when she decided to a take a job at China's best university. She cleaned dorm rooms, moped the hallway of the fifth floor and made sure foreign students did not sneak fireworks into the building. She did this for many months, working efficiently, impressing her bosses so much that they promoted her to desk worker. The job comes with a slight bump in pay and a significant reduction in the amount time spent bent over.

But her promotion did not come with a customed name tag. She remains, to the hundreds of students who walk by her desk each day, just a number. What a terrible metaphor for the dehumanizing elements of Chinese working life.

Nearly every service worker in China wears a uniform. The fuyuans here at Tsinghua wore blue when I first arrive, but switched to a pastel pink around the time the air conditioning turned on. They are expected to perform as a unit. Each morning at 8:05 a.m., all employees must line up outside each dormitory and march in a line. The building boss barks excercises and criticizes the previous day's performance. This is standard practice at a Chinese hotel, barber shop or department store.

People are expected to blend in, provide equal levels of service and work as a unit. This happens in America, Europe and elsewhere in Asia. This is the twenty-first century and we believe in homogenization. So I guess what really throws me over the line is the name tag. The name tag is the one element of the service worker uniform that is supposed to distingush the employee. To inform you that this is Ellen; the person that spilled the soda on your blouse yesterday was Linda. Please don't yell at me.

This evening Ryan served me an order of garlic breadsticks at Pyro Pizza. He brought the order out hot, removed it right after I finished my last stick and refilled my glass of water several times. A pretty fine server, especially for someone not working for tips.

I know his name is Ryan from the fight outside Propoganda a few nights back. He's a friendly guy, with pretty good English. I wouldn't mind grabbing a beer with him sometime after work. But here at Pyro (a business owned by an American) he's just "Trainee." At Pyro, they don't even get numbers.

When, I asked Ryan, does one graduate from trainee status?

"I'm not sure," Ryan said. "Maybe three months."

I hope that full-waiter status means a nametag, and while they're printing one of for him, make some for the fuyuan in Building No. 20.

Her name is Liu Meimei.

Searching for Wang Bing

BEIJING – The hunt for Wang Bing is in its second week.

True, search parties have only combed a small area near the Wudaokou Subway Station, and these searches usually occur on the way home from a late-night snack, but there is nevertheless a corps of troops looking for the missing chicken wing salesman. I am one of them.

Wang Bing usually works in front of 7-11 on Wudaokou's pathetic strip of bars. With the closure of Zub in May and its replacement with a pizza joint, there is really only one bar, Propaganda. The chicken wing sellers keep coming each day, drawn by the hundreds drawn to that underground dance floor and hoping their name recognition will mean a few students will stop by for a wing or two after a hard night out in a more happening district.

But upon returning from Laos I couldn't locate Wang Bing. There was no sign of him, nor him eager assistant, Calvin, from Zach's birthday party a few months back. Instead a man wearing a polyester black-and-white Polo shirt stood and Wang Bing's position.

He introduced himself as Wang Bing's younger brother. Wang Bing, he said, now sells wings in another place. All of his old costumers are now encouraged to patronize his sibling.

"If you're his sibling," I said. "Where was he born?"

No response. Wang Bing's from Chongqing. I learned that on my eighth wing. This man may have known Wang Bing, but he wasn't family.

I moved down the line of vendors, asking about Wang Bing's fate. I heard a couple different stories. Some confirmed that yes, Wang Bing had moved on. Others said no, Wang Bing's just home visiting relatives. He'd be back soon.

A week passed. I became a prostitute and waited for my new credit cards to arrive. I stayed at Dongshengyuan – East Rising Apartment Complex – in a friend's apartment. Each night I passed the line of roast wings, stopping frequently for a wing or two.
One night a group of shirtless Chinese spilled out of Propaganda, running after a Frenchman. They circled him, lunging forward, kicking and punching before retreating. A couple of the Frenchman's compatriots joined in, and the Chinese responded by breaking bottles. A waiter at the new pizza restaurant, Pyro Pizza, tried to break up the fight and wound up with a piece of glass in his left forearm. The police eventually had to be called, and with the sounds of sirens the shirtless Chinese scattered.

"Huai ren." Little Wang Bing said. Bad people.

And with the new semester about to begin, that's where the bone lies. Wang Bing, the great personality of last semester, is missing. Perhaps no one at Tsinghua will ever see him or his third thumb again. The story is frustratingly incomplete, and I should accept there is a good possibility that Wang Bang has disappeared into the vast ocean of Beijingers, and that he won’t surface near my life again.


Previous Mostly Red Entries about Wang Bing:

Celvin
Wang Bing’s Long Day
His Wings Still Flap
Birds of a Feather, Grill Together

A Nice, Fatty Slab of Man Meat

BEIJING – Here in China, I get what I want.

When I shout "fuyuan," the waitress comes running across the restaurant to see if I need more dumplings. Outside of Beijing's trendiest club districts, the owner of a bar will not only admit me at any time, but frequently take me to the Very Important Person room, complete with free drinks. People line up just to converse with me on the subway, train or even while eating a bowl cold noodles.

There's nothing special about me, I'm just a foreigner in China. People here treat me with a degree of deference that would be unheard of in America. It's outrageous, really, and I found how demeaning it can be to serve rather than be served; I became a prostitute.

Zack arranged the position. My travel mate through South Asia, not four days out of the hospital (and as it would turn out, only a day away from another visit) sat in the middle of Beijing Language and Culture University Bla Bla bar's courtyard, intoxicated. At his table sat Evan, our American friend, and two Asians. I sipped my first beer as our new friends explained why we needed to leave soon.

"Do you want to drink beer, sing song, meet beautiful women and make money?" the skinner one asked me. He claimed to be Kazakh-Chinese, or perhaps Chinese-Kazakh, and went to People's University here in Beijing.

Zack didn't believe him, but he couldn't say "what's the catch?" in Chinese: The four had been talking past each other for some time before I arrived. The Kazakh wanted us to go to a club in the Xizhimen district, about three miles away. We would earn money because few foreigners go this club, and they want us to talk to the women.

I agreed with Zack, it sounded too good to be true. I wanted to sip beer with my friends, share stories recent vacations, of Laotian drug dealers and Indian computer nerds, not blast off to some crazy club. But the more we sat there, and the more the two pleaded, the more Zack want to go. I said no to Zach and explained to the Kazakh
I just couldn’t take him up on his business opportunity tonight.

Thirty minutes later we arrived at the club. It was a massive structure, attached to the Tianfan Hotel off the Third Ring Road. The club – actually a karaoke bar – rose four feet and was covered with neon strips on three sides. There was a massive enclosed valet area, and our taxi was opened by a man dressed in a pressed, starched shirt.

The Kazakh convinced me to come, as he thought I had the best Chinese in the group, and would be needed to translate. Zack really, really, really wanted to go, and Evan seemed up for it, so reluctantly I agreed to go and look around.

"If things look bad," I warned the Kazakh. "We're leaving."

The first room resembled a hotel lobby, with a large arrangement of fake flowers and twisted branches, and a spiral staircase leading up to the second level. We went upstairs and were led into a room overlooking a dance floor. Standing in the room were several dozen Chinese, all male and young.

"These are all nanji," the Kazakh whispered in my ear. The word means roosters, but it’s also slang for male prostitutes. What? If everyone in the room is a prostitute, who were we?

One of the young men came up to Evan and me, wanting a picture. I obliged, sitting on a red couch with the young professional between us. After he finished another came over with his camera phone, and another. Some spoke to us while getting their snap. Where were we from? How did we get to China? Where did we learn Chinese? The usual spiel, but here I found myself talking about my sister in the strangest of circumstances. One broad-shouldered man, much larger than the others, asked if we'd been to Henan Province and said he had studied at the Shaolin Temple.

At 1:30 on the dot, all the men moved across the hall into a small room, some kind of staff lounge for the club. We couldn't get inside, but after a couple minutes the Kazakh tried to led us along with several of the young men into a nearby room. It was a karaoke booth, a small room with a long couch around one wall, an entertainment system opposite and a glass table in the middle. Gaudy brown and white wallpaper peeled on the high corners of the walls and dusty fake flower arrangements were placed at random locations in the room.

Inside I could see three women, all dressed in skimpy dressed and loads of makeup. Their permed haircuts reached the middle of their backs. They looked young and empowered, the men who stood in front of them just young.

The Kazakh explained more as I looked on from outside the door. The men are paraded in, six or eight at a time. The women ask questions, and then choose their entertainer. Soon the former Shaolin monk sat next to a customer with a black patent leather purse.

Our funhouse tour continued. Now we were led into an empty karaoke room. On the couch sat a man around 40, with a squared-off haircut and a black suit. This was the boss, and he began our meeting with a cigarette. "What exactly did these two tell you about this place?" he said, gesturing toward the Kazakh and his silent assistant.

I told him our story so far, how we'd been plucked from the foreign student university's bar and dragged out here just to take a look. The boss seemed pleased.

"You get here at 11," he said. "You can leave at 4, but if you still have a costumer if you have to stay until they leave. Each night you will make at least 500 RMB. You can start tomorrow, but wear nice pants and real shoes."

I looked down at my flip-flips and hairy feet covered in dried, crusty sweat and felt embarrassed. I promised to look better the next time we returned, and thanked the man for his time.

We left the room, and I told our hosts that it was time to go. But instead of taking us toward the exit, they led us into one final room. Now we were the ones on
display, put in front of three hungry women. They wanted man-meat.

"Where are you from?" One asked me. "How old are you?" said another.

"Can you dance?" asked the third.

I felt mortified. To these people I was an exotic monkey with a miniature symbol, a cute toy that would liven up a night on the town. These costumers probably spent years making a fortune in real estate or manufactured, now they wanted to be fawned over. Staring at these ravenous people, I knew that I couldn't never work here at the karaoke club, even if I never established whether or not I would be expected to "entertain" these people back at their hotel suites.

Prostitution is dehumanizing. Being any kind of servant, required to dance when someone says ‘dance’ and bark out an awful version of Aerosmith's "I Don't to Miss a Thing" on cue is terrible too. Even services that I take for granted are vaguely unsettling. Why should a woman run across the room just because I need a package of salt? Maybe I don't always need to get what I want.

Dog Fights

CHANGSHA, China – Translating a Chinese name into Roman characters can obscure personality traits. Guo Sanjun, or Sanjun Guo, written in letters means little. But 郭三军 goes a long way towards explaining why this man seemed so happy to explain the advantages of Russian fighter jets at a quarter past midnight.

San or 三 means three, jun or 军 an all-purpose character for military things. Take together "三军" is Third Army. What a presumptuous name! Did his parents know that he would grow up to be a towering giant, over six feet tall with a wide frame? That he job would require him to participate in meetings with Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao and other members of China's crème de la crème?

I could have asked Mrs. Guo, but the timing seemed wrong. She appeared in the hallway of the soft sleeper train car in her pink nightgown. When her mouth opened to speak there were only four teeth, each one a solitary piece of enamel in an empty quadrant. Like many older Chinese women she seemed timeless: I would have accepted her age
being 55 or 90. She appeared annoyed.

"Why are you still awake?" she said to her son. "You talk too much. These people aren't interested. Come to bed."

Sanjun, the largest man in the compartment, bigger than a billion of his countryman, at first responded to the rebuke with sheepishness, his face pointed down at the floor. But then, perhaps realizing that he is 35-years-old and no longer 12, lashed out.

"I'm talking to these foreigners!" He gestured toward Zach and I. "We're discussing things!"

Mrs. Guo didn't looked impressed. Her son meekly ended his tirade by promising to come back to the sleeping cabin soon.

The pair was returning from a vacation in Yunnan, to see the Old Town in Lijiang and Tiger Leaping Gorge, by some measurements the deepest gorge in the world. When the T-62 finished its 38 hour journey from Kunming to Beijing, Mr. Guo would resume his job at the Ministry of Athletics. He introduced himself as a secretary, playing off the duel meanings of the word. He supervised Olympic preparations but served as a stenographer when high Communist Party officials held meetings.

He works, in his own words, like a dog. Six days is a short week, seven is a long one (the Chinese are striving, but have not yet succeeded in creating an eighth day). As the Olympics get closer there are more of the latter than the former.
"I am serving my country," he said. "This is my chance to be in the history."

That last quote featured a bit of Chinglish because this conversation took place mostly in English, the first since crossing the Laos border. At the hospital, on the bus, on the train, I used Chinese. I mention this because this man's education (at People's University, the third best school in Beijing) and language abilities ("I'd better know English," Sanjun said. "I paid a fucking lot of money to learn it.") set him apart from the ordinary Chinese I have been meeting on this trip. This is a man of some privilege, and his blunt opinions surprised me.

We met in the dining car. Zach and I played a card game called "500," a variation of Gin Rummy. At Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, six armed policemen escorted a pregnant woman with child off the train. Later in the evening, after the fuyuans pushed us out of the dining car to make way for overflow passengers and we went into the soft sleeper car's hallway to converse, Sanjun told us the woman had been caught smuggling drugs.

They found 470 grams of heroin hiding against her swollen belly. She would get 10 years, Sanjun said, and then told us about Chinese drug law. At the national level, getting caught with 500 grams – a little more than a pound – is a death sentence. Some municipalities are tougher. In Beijing 100 grams buys a free bullet, the same in
Shanghai. But Chinese are not without compassion; a pregnant woman is not killed.

Sanjun explained that drug traffickers take advantage of this loophole, luring hundreds of pregnant peasants as mules from the Burmese border of Yuannan Province toward the major shipping ports along the Southeastern coastline. The Third Army man had little sympathy.

"They're all dogs," he said. "Fucking bitches."

Then Sanjun brought out the military hardware, a thick pile of Chinese military magazines. He held me read through the latest issue, one with a line of Russian soldiers on the front. The F-18 is now outdated. There are mechanical problems with some Israeli equipment deployed in the West Bank. The magazine's longest article was a profile of three "Heroes of the Nation," a family of physicists. Readers are breathlessly told how California Institute of Technology staff said they would rather shoot the brilliant scientists than allow them to return home to the Motherland. But they did, and they proved key when China's hydrogen and nuclear bomb programs.
Sanjun helped me translate with relish, filling in words such as "advantage," "traitor," and "celebration," quickly. I liked this man, his clearly drawn sense of morality and crisp humor. If he believed I belonged to a class of American devils, he didn't let on.

“Third Army” isn’t a ridiculous name in the People’s Republic of China. The Third Army fought bravely in both the Chinese Civil War and Second World War (known here as The War to Resist Japanese Aggression. Edgar Snow’s classic Maoist account of the Revolution mentions a failed mutiny right here in Changsha. “However, the revolt was quickly suppressed, due to the loyalty of the Third Army,” he writes.

With his name carrying such a history, Sanjun’s unfettering support of the state is not a surprise: it’s foretold in his characters. He justified his militarism to me with a joke: "Other people do drugs. Some people like pussy. I read this." I laughed and accepted this position. When we parted shortly after the appearance of his nightgown-clad mother and did the customary exchange of phone numbers and e-mail addresses, I thought this time I might actually hang out with this man and argue military tactics among the dogs of Beijing.

Working the Electronic Corner

KUNMING, China - Prostitutes aren't stupid.

One rang me up at the Golden Bridge Hotel just a couple hours ago. "I heard you're staying until six this evening," a female voice said. "What are you doing? Do you want a massage?"

I declined, not wanting the elicit the services of anyone working at this dive-y hotel next to the railway station. The shower didn't work, the sink held several years worth of mildew and my pillow had a yellow stain on the right corner. I'll take my foot rubs somewhere else.

But how did the prostitute (Let me clarify something here: When a woman calls a hotel room in China soliciting massages, she's always a prostitute, or at least a madam.) know I'd decided to spend a couple extra hours at the Golden Bridge?

Her call came only ten minutes after a furious argument at the front desk. After arriving at one in the morning, Zack and I made it out of the room at 12:40, over half an hour after the official check out time. Now I'm not a morning person, and I frequently make it out just after the official leaving time. I've always been able to cajole my way out of paying the extra fee. Not here.

"Foreigners and Chinese are the same!" the fuyuan at the counter said. "Everyone pays the fee!"

"You're cheating me!" I howled back. "We stayed here not even 11 hours."

"It's the all the same!"

This went on for several minutes, until I was forced to make a tactical retreat. I accepted paying the half-day charge, but swore to be in my room until 6 p.m., the maximum time alloted. I would get my revenge my disrupting the routine of the cleaning woman. It's a petty move, but sometimes I'm petty.

And the hotel staff had their revenge. While I stormed back up to the fifth floor with my backpack, they placed a call to the hotel's massage liaison. There's a couple of waiguoren in Room 526 looking for some action.

Crash Test Dummies

JINGHONG, China - The bulldozer turned sharply, rotating 90 degrees in two seconds to completely block our way forward. The operator lowered the bucket halfway to increase the meance of the construction vehicle. At the same time, a dump trunk drove behind and cut out off the rear. The highway gang had us trapped.

 

The bus driver should have known better than to try and shave an hour off the 200 kilometer trip between the Laotian border town of Mengla and the capital of Xishuangbanna, Jinghong. Instead of taking the winding road through minority villages and tropical mountains, he decided to take us over the unfinished four lane highway.

By unfinished, I mean the construction crews still deployed on every mile of this soon-to-be major aetary connecting Laos and Yunnan Province. Workers were still living on the road in old military tents, laundry was still drying on clothes lines hitched up on the shoulder. Mudslide barriers still needed cement to be poured. Some areas were paved, others weren't.

 

I especially enjoyed the tunnels. By going through mountains instead of around them, tractor trailers will be able to bring trade goods to Northern Laotian towns such as Luang Prabang and Vang Vieng like never before. But the trucks shouldn't leave the dock yet. As of yesterday these tunnels had no tile, no lights and piles of dirt at random intervals. Our bus driver turned on his brights and plowed through, narrowly missing a couple people driving the other way on motorbikes.

 

Chinese construction safety standards haven't quite reached Western levels. Our bus driver asked construction workers periodically if could enter a tunnel or bridge. "Mei sur," they all said. No problem. Never mind that hundreds of men were deployed along the road, along with heavy equipment or that the road hadn't been through safety inspection. The friendly men and women are pleased to have the 3:15 bus passengers from Mengla to Jinghong serve as test drivers.

 

Everyone except one pain-in-the-ass supervisor. He wore a straw hat with a red badge around his neck indicating his managerial status. He waved his hands and face furiously as soon as he saw the bus. No, no, no, no. We couldn't pass. The bus driver sent out his ticket collector to negotiate. No success. The bus driver tried again. No change. Then he decided to try and pass anyway, as not going through would mean a ten kilometer detour back to the last connecting path to the old road. That's when the man deployed his heavy machinery and created the standoff.

 

We won. After a couple minutes the bulldozer backed away and continued clearing a pile of dirt. The man in the straw hat continued to wave his hands, but by then we were headed toward the next tunnel. One hundred meters up the road we came to another dump truck. In passing, our driver asked if we could continue into the tunnel.

 

The dump truck driver smiled. "Mei shir."