Mr. China Read Free Page B

that under the planned economy, it made no difference whether a hotel was full or empty
and if there were guests there would be more work to do. Since everything was owned by the State no one cared; in fact, no one higher up even knew what was going on. So the receptionist would
simply announce that they were full and wave people away so that she could go back to her newspaper.
    The trick was to come back with objections until they finally agreed to let you in. It was the same in shops, at bus stations, in restaurants or when hiring bicycles. Sometimes I had to persuade
a shop assistant to sell me something that I could see behind the counter; she’d say it had already been sold or that it was broken or that it was the last one and had to be kept for display.
I’d go into a restaurant and they’d tell me that there was no rice or I’d go to a bar and they’d pretend to be out of beer. I even found a restaurant in Xi’an that
closed for lunch. But after a while, I learnt to probe and question, cajole and persuade – and never to give in! So I barged into kitchens in restaurants to find something to eat and went
upstairs in hotels in search of an empty room; I grabbed whatever I needed from behind shop counters and searched sheds for bicycles to hire. Even going to buy vegetables was a challenge but I
sensed a rapport with the people I met; it was almost as if they enjoyed the game of wits and they often gave me a laugh or a smile once they finally gave in. I never felt any malice from them; it
was more like a bad habit that no one seemed able to kick.
    There were many other habits that could push a newcomer into either loving or hating China: the extreme curiosity towards foreigners in the 1980s, for example, or the dogged adherence to
incomprehensible rules. When the attendant on a railway carriage woke you up in the middle of the night for the third time to clean under your feet with a filthy black mop, just because there was a
regulation to sweep the floor every two hours, you would, as they say, either laugh or cry. There wasn’t much middle ground. On the other hand, ordinary things like hotel notices or
restaurant menus were full of bizarre rules and mistranslations. There were signs everywhere that said ‘Beware of Smoking’ and ‘Stop Spitting!’ The regulations in the
Shanghai Peace Hotel included restrictions on ‘bringing poisonous or radioactive substances into the hotel’ or ‘letting off fireworks in the room’, as if such matters were
perfectly normal occurrences. Also banned was ‘fighting, gambling, drug taking, whoring or making of great noise’, and there was a rule that no guest was (sic) ‘ allowed to
up anyone in their room for the night’. Another hotel had a brochure which described its wonderful gardens and said that they hoped that ‘all our guests will be depressed by the
flowers’; the Chinese version meant ‘impressed.’ Restaurant menus were similar; I found an upmarket restaurant in Guangzhou which served ‘camel’s hump in wonderful
taste’, ‘double boiled deer’s tail in water duck soup’ and ‘roasted sausages in osmanthus flowers’. Another one down the road, which was slightly more modest and
obviously trying to attract foreigners, had its menu in English offering ‘lunch on meat with egg’ and ‘scramfled egg with lunch on meat’, but it rather lost track with the
‘squid beard’ and ‘fried field snail in bear sauce’. I thought it must have meant ‘beer’ sauce, so I looked up the Chinese characters, but they seemed to mean
something to do with ‘bell peppers’ so I was none the wiser.
    Over and above the chaos on the streets, the mistranslations and endearing absurdity, there were huge changes under way that brought to mind the old aphorism attributed to Napoleon: ‘Let
China sleep, for when she wakes up she will shake the world.’ True, China was starting from a low base but the vast majority of the changes was positive.