Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation Read Free Page A

Eastern Europe, I always felt a little sorry for those who focused on China. The poor, misguided fools, I thought. Didn’t they know that Moldova was the future? In the years that followed, Greg, a fluent speaker of Chinese and Japanese, eventually left the world of finance and became a high school history teacher in San Jose. I was on the road one summer, and after a reading in San Francisco, I caught up with Greg at a bar near Union Square. He had just returned from a yearlong sabbatical in Shanghai, where he had taught English, and he spoke effusively about the country.
    “It’s where it’s all happening now,” he said with his California drawl. “I’ve spent most of my life chasing the next new thing. And now the next new thing is China. The center of gravity has moved east—business, finance, manufacturing, everything revolves around China. For the first time in their history, the average Chinese has an opportunity to get rich. They know that opportunity might close at any time. So they’re going after it with everything they have. It’s just crazy over there.”
    The China he spoke of seemed so vastly at odds with the China I had grown up with. Where were the May Day parades, the ominous displays of military might, the calls to revolution? Where were the workers in the jaunty Mao jackets?
    “That China is gone,” Greg said. “You need to go and see for yourself. And you definitely need to teach your kids Mandarin. When they grow up, they’ll be working for Chinese companies. If I were you, I’d move to China for a few years, because you’re not going to understand this world if you don’t understand China.”
    This seemed like an excellent idea. Of course, lots of ideas look good after a few beers. Nevertheless, I had been looking to make a change anyway. Once again, Sylvia had led me to one of the more exotic corners of the world—Sacramento. Every morning, I’d wake up and think, What events in space and time have brought me to this strange place? Don’t get me wrong. Sacramento is a lovely place, particularly for those with a fondness for methamphetamines. For the meth-addled, Sacramento had conveniently placed a Greyhound bus station just yards from the statehouse where Austria’s finest was sworn in as governor of the great state of California. Around the corner, the budget-conscious speed freak can find a half-dozen $5-a-night flophouses that will happily overlook their need to bounce off walls. And should a meth addict have a disagreeable experience with law enforcement, downtown Sacramento offered a plethora of bail bondsmen only too happy to assist.
    We even had meth addicts for neighbors, which made for some very lively evenings. Our neighborhood, a standard California burb of stucco and tile, had been overtaken by America’s latest, greatest search for free money—the housing bubble. Working on my laptop in cafés, I listened to the yammering of mortgage brokers, all pushing the zero-down, introductory teaser rate, interest-only, optional payment, adjustable rate, here’s-a-half-million-if-you-can-fog-a-mirror kind of mortgages that fueled the exhilaration of collective financial madness. Within three years, houses had doubled in value. Within six, they had tripled. Speculators were buying houses a dozen at a time. Homebuilders reacted by building thousands of new homes and people bought them as investments because, of course, real estate only goes up in California. Everyone wants to live here, even in Sacramento, a little corner of Oklahoma that got lost and found itself on the other side of the Sierra Nevada. Our neighbor’s house was one such “investment,” and while the owner applauded herself for her financial acumen, her renters happily used her property to conduct a brisk business in stolen cars and crystal meth. The couple who lived there had three children. For simplicity’s sake, each was apparently named Motherfucker, as in Motherfucker, turn the fucking TV down,