Chinese Confession - Kung Fu, Fish Follies, and the Grand Canal

At this point in my China experience, I think it is pretty safe to say that Americans, overall, have a rather distorted perception of what China is like. That’s actually a best-case scenario. It would probably be more accurate to say that Americans have a completely wrong image of China. I can now dispel at least one more rumor: it’s really easy to get around in China because (1) everybody in the big cities speaks English, and (2) all the cab drivers speak English.

One of the delightful things about China is that many of the things that are so expensive back in the US are much more affordable here. Take taxis for example. If I decide to take a taxi to People’s Square, which is basically the busiest, most central part of this city, it would cost a bit over 20 Yuan, which converts to about $3 in the US. The best part is that if I have four people in the cab, it’s the same price. The bad part is that if I am unfamiliar with the city and the routes, the drivers can sometimes take a less direct route and drive up the price (no pun intended) by another dollar or so. The trip takes us about 10 minutes – 15 if there is traffic – and is also much quicker than taking the metro, which takes about an hour. It’s also about 50 cents less expensive. I know it’s not much, but you’d be surprised what al you can get here for 50 cents. The bad thing is that I have yet to meet a cab driver in this city who actually speaks English. Fortunately I can actually pronounce things in a semi-comprehensible manner, so the driver can usually figure out where I’m wanting to go. The bad thing is I can understand about one out of five words that they say, at best. So it makes communication a bit challenging at times.

This weekend I went to a nearby city, Suzhou, with a few friends. We took a high speed train to get there, which topped out at 248 kmph (153mph), enjoying the luxury of first class seats for about $4.50 each. Suzhou is widely known for its beautiful parks and canals. Dubbed “the Venice of the East,” it is clearly apparent why it merits such a title.

It also happens to be a “small” Chinese city with a mere 5.1 million people in the greater area of the city. To be quite honest, I was surprised that the population was as high as they said it was. I would have guessed its population to be closer to 500,000. A population of 5.1 million people makes it about twice as big as Denver, but it didn’t even have a business district. It didn’t have very many high-rise buildings either, which lets the truth really sink in about the living conditions for the people. Chinese people really pack into the places where they live. It’s pretty normal for an entire family to live in a tiny one or two bedroom apartment with a kitchen about half the size of an American bathroom, no living room, and often no balcony. Owning an actual house is a luxury affordable by very, very few. In this country, you quickly learn to eliminate your bubble of personal space around you. If you bump into someone, you don’t say “excuse me”. Rubbing up against people is not just completely normal, it’s expected. On the roads, the vehicle with the most mass usually rules. That makes buses seemingly lethal. They are the craziest drivers out there too. If I can make it home without an all-out phobia of public buses, I will be doing well.

In Suzhou, we decided to skip the hassle of getting around the city by bus, and instead opted to hire a couple to drive us around the city in their van all day. Actually, this service was offered to us the moment we emerged from the train station. Now this is living it up! Our own personal guides that knew the city, that were able to drive on the roads without allowing us to get killed by a monstrous bus, let alone even get in an accident. We had our list of places we wanted to go to, and our guides knew the best way to get there, whether they were good to see or not, and helped make everything go smoothly. However, just like the taxi drivers and the vast majority of the people here, they spoke no English. That was okay though because my Chinese was the worst of the four of us, and a lot of people think my Chinese is pretty good. We also bartered the price for this convenient form of transit for the day down to 100 Yuan, which is about $15. Honestly, I don’t know how they make it worthwhile for that little money, but somehow they do. Had we taken cabs all day, it would have easily topped that price and taken twice as long. Gas alone here is well over 80 Yuan per liter, which converts to about $5 per gallon. I expect that they probably got a share of the money that we spent at the places we visited, including the restaurant where we ate lunch. Oh, we also didn’t pay them until the end of the day, so there was no risk that they would take our money and run. It was great!

We saw a park, which was absolutely jaw-dropping with its Zen-like feel and meticulous attention to every detail imaginable. It was a huge park too. We walked around for about an hour and a half and I still never got to see all of it. I have heard, however, that many parks in China are very similar, so I’m not terribly disappointed. The admission to the park was almost $10, which was admittedly a bit steep by my standards, but it was amazing.

We also got to see the canal that runs through the town by getting a couple of men to take us aboard a long, very Chinese looking boat. This was about $6 for each of us, and it was amazing! It took us into the narrow canals of the town too, where people live in these tiny, somewhat dilapidated-looking houses with doors that sometimes open directly to the water of the canal. The white paint of the houses peeled away at the corners, exposing the rustic masonry that made up the irregular and incredibly picturesque homes. Clothes hung out to dry just feet away from us, a seemingly vain effort to dry the laundry in an environment where the humidity is almost always 100%. We passed under low, tight bridges, sometimes by mere inches and carefully navigated by the skill of the boat driver. We passed countless doors and windows, many of which rest ajar with an unobstructed view of the lives and the people inside. One woman was busy making lunch. In another window was a child playing, pausing momentarily to look at us as we passed, curiosity etched in his eyes. Another doorway opened to a dark room where the water of the canal entered into the house. They must be quite accustomed to this kind of life and lack of privacy, but again, this is something you get used to in a country of 1.3 billion people. Although this is definitely a tourist hotspot, we still drew many stairs from people along the banks of the canal, taking a break from their work. In another place, I saw two women wearing wide peasant hats to further shield them from the sun which was already blocked by the thick clouds and smog of this industrial city.

Industry is hardly new to a place like this. The grand canal of China was started as an ambitious project by the Chinese all they way back in 486 BC and was finally completed in its entirety after 600 AD. It’s 1,100 miles long, making the Suez or Panama canals look like mere driveways. It was also constructed during an era when the European nations were too busy bickering amongst themselves to accomplish anything of this kind of scale. It stretches from an area southwest of Shanghai all the way up to Beijing. This would be close to the distance between New York and Atlanta. Needless to say, it’s an amazing project, and we got to see a tiny section of us up close and personal. Oh yeah, our boat drivers didn’t speak English either.

We saw a neat factory where they make silk, which was surprisingly interesting and short enough to accommodate my attention span.

We then went to another park that featured part of a defensive wall that is over 2,500 years old. Okay, at this point I have to change the topic just a little bit. We all know those Kung Fu movies that we associate with Chinese cinema. Perhaps we jokingly think that all Chinese people know Kung Fu and that people just break out into random, impossibly-choreographed-yet-totally-impromptu fighting scenes. I definitely dismissed any expectation to run into something like this. That’s Hollywood, after all. So you can imagine my surprise when we were walking along the base of this really old, huge, and amazing wall toward the entrance part of it. We stopped there, and just gaped at the scene in front of us. We were standing in a big gate about 10 feet wide, with a big sand pit before us and walls at least 20 feet high all around us. In this small area, there were dozens of young Chinese men all waiting for something. We stood there at the entrance gate mere feet away from all of these people, when suddenly one guy in a harness ran straight up the wall at the exact same moment one of my friends tried to ask him what was going on. It must have been a cue, because everyone started fighting. It was obviously not real fighting, but it was still cool to see, if not quite random. Who would have thought that, in coming to China, we would be wandering around and actually randomly see a bunch of people fighting like in the Chinese action movies? Well, it happened. They even did some of the typical moves like having one person fighting 8 others and throws them all off at once. Others were doing flips and dodging swipes, kicking, hitting, shoving, running. It was crazy! I even got pictures! It was really cool. Then they abruptly stopped. I had no idea why or what they were doing. I’m going to just pretend that they did it just for us. It’s either that or this is what it’s really like in China. Who knows, really? This country is nuts!

We wandered around the garden section, which I found to be even more amazing, peaceful, and picturesque than the first one we visited.

When we got to a big pond, there was a whole lot of commotion coming from one area that quickly drew our attention, awaking us from our state of blissful peace. There, along a balcony that overlooked a side of the pond, where hundreds of brilliantly colored fish all splashing around in one tight area along the side with a dozen people looking down at them. We went over there to see what was going on. There was a vendor there selling small bags of fish food for 15 cents that you could drop, pour, or dump into the water and watch the fish all clamor and fight in what must be an oft-repeated feeding ritual. When I got to the side and looked down, it seemed unreal. These fish were HUGE! There were hundreds of Coy, all brightly colored, and as you fed them, the fish would congregate, then get more crowded, and more crowded, and soon enough there were so many of these giant, brightly colored fish that it looked more like a giant feeding frenzy/fish mosh pit. I’m not exaggerating either. You would look down and at any given moment see dozens of colorful mouths gaping wide open, anxiously trying to get some of the food that was so generously falling from above. These fish were, on average, between 12 inches and 18 inches long, I estimated. There were some really big ones that were probably 24 inches long or even longer. They would get so crowded that some would get pushed up from out of the water, then flap their fins and tail wildly because they were out of the water and on top of all the others, eventually working their way to the side of the swarm where it was less dense and they could sink back into the water. They would then turn immediately and fight to get back into the swarm, where they would stick their mouths out of the water, mouths gaping open and closing every couple of seconds, and fight to get yet more of the food. This would go on as long as someone was pouring out food pellets. Once the flow of food stopped, they become eerily silent and the swarm would slowly begin to disperse. It was a very strange sight to see after they made such a ruckus. Within a couple of seconds of food hitting the water again, however, they turned and swam toward that place. It didn’t take long at all for the craziness to resurface (no pun intended).

After this park, we went back to the train station to get a bite to eat, paid our chauffeurs, and waited for our train back to Shanghai. I’m not sure exactly what happened or when it happened, but somehow I ended up losing my ticket while we were at the station. I didn’t realize this until about 15 minutes before our train left, and by then there were definitely no seats or tickets available for purchase. The trains here are almost always filled to overcapacity. What they do is sell all of the tickets for the seats on the train, but they also sell standing-only tickets. When you get one of those, you get to do just that: stand. This was what I had to do, since there were no seats left. I actually had no choice but to buy a ticket for a train that was to leave at 9:00pm instead of the 7:20pm one that we were all planning on taking. I bought the ticket, and we were trying to devise a plan by which I would be able to get on board and still make it back with the others. I was basically going to pretend that I am an ignorant American and can’t speak any Chinese (which isn’t too far from the truth, based on my ability to communicate sometimes) and that I got sold a bad ticket. We were hoping that the crowd would be so crazy that they would just check that my ticket was for Shanghai and that they wouldn’t pay any attention to the time of the train my ticket displayed. When they opened up the gates for people boarding the train, we got through in the mad crowd (these train stations are insanely crowded and even more insanely pushy) and there wasn’t anyone checking tickets. Then when the train arrived at the platform, we were certain that the staff on the train would be checking tickets in each car as people boarded. We were sure that I would get kicked off and told to wait for the next train. Fortunately things worked out and there was nobody there checking tickets either. I did have to stand in the isle of the train for an hour, as did many, many other people all throughout the train (Chinese trains are insanely crowded), but I got home safely and without incident, so I was completely happy. All in all, it was a truly crazy day. I experienced a bit of everything: history, craziness, meditation-enducing gardens, craziness, first class tickets on a high speed train, craziness, standing-only tickets on a low-scale train, more craziness, random Kung Fu, craziness, crazy fish, and even some craziness in there. So, if you ever find yourself in the Shanghai area, I highly recommend you check out Suzhou. I certainly wasn’t disappointed. It didn’t contribute to my phobia of the fearless, crazy public buses.