my serialized travel book about china

for...

ned raggett, david drake, and my wife

foreword by

FILL IN LATER

introduction

this is my travel book about china, serialized on ilx new answers page. i took a bunch of trips to china and also lived there. i also went to some places near china but they're almost china, so i might include those.

my mom says there's a lot of black people in china

lots of african students in cities like nanjing. they speak fluent mandarin and have been there a minute. it's cool. my friend jamal in nanjing got paid to fly from africa and live in china and study mandarin and computer science. he got halfway thru and started running a club and rapping and shooting videos in his club. all the places with fake rocawear shit in nanjing are run by africans.

beijing is sort of famous for its african drug dealers, too, i guess. another thing to lord over shanghai.

CHAPTER ONE

SHANDONG

a hard sleeper from jinan to yantai. really, the bed is soft, though.

the cabin was full of sweaty dudes that looked like gym teachers or some shit, all pulling their long white socks up out of mizuno sneakers and fiddling with their fanny packs and ugly grey motorolas and big plastic bags of fruit. then, reading pulp sci-fi magazines and noisily and unself-consciously sucking lychees louder than i've ever heard a lychee sucked, SLLLLLLURPing the pulp off of the pit and flicking the pit out the window.

down the corridor, the folddown tables and chairs are full of the same men but twenty years later, tearing apart the chinese retirement system but then giving up and playing checkers.

lychee sucking, well-what-are-we-gonna-do sighs in the corridor from the checkers/pension plan analysts, clickclick of the shitty painted green fans up on the ceiling, fall asleep listening to it in the middle of shandong province. wake up on the tip of shandong, in yantai.

the story of the name: japan was sort of chaotic before it was unified whenever (i just read about this, before nobunaga and the two other guys united japan), it was chaotic and there were always pirate attacks on ming dynasty china (all over the place and way deep inland all the way to nanjing), so the japs weren't allowed to land anywhere in china and yantai was like a little outpost where before was only a fishing village. and they called it SMOKE PLATFORM because they had a big platform with smoke coming off of it to warn the japs.

the yantai train station has the feel of any chinese rural station. a roof and a slab of cement and a cement cube with a waiting room and ticket office. that's it. it's like stepping off at any shandong train station (even jinan).

but the city has the old, solid, dignified feeling of those cities north of it, across the bohai sea, the ones that were just sorta flipped between colonizing powers over the years and came out looking really nice, a japanese tramline here, some german architecture there, real nice. because it was a lot like those cities up north, dalian, whatever: the japs had it, the germans had it, the russians had it, the americans had it.

the feeling of a lot of the cities stuck in the center of china, sorta orbitting shanghai and xuzhou and nanjing, etc. is still fuckin rural. country as FUCK. always got a real temporary feeling while being awash in cash. massive squares ringed with department stores and real brands and black unplated audis and buicks everywhere. sprawling suburbs of weird cubey concrete villa gated communities. but still the feeling like one day all the money will slide back out like a tide and leave the place fucked and rural again, a new set of ruins in the middle of town, some shit with donkey teams pulling rusted out audis. but yantai is on some northeast, sophisticated and colonized type of shit.

when we walk along teh seawall, an old lady pops out and asks if i'm finnish. she lives in a house from the 30s that was the finnish consulate and she's got a finnish flag in the window and i try to figure out why finland was here in the 1930s and our history of china, combined, isn't sufficient to puzzle it out and she distracts us with the italian trade office right beside her house and some norwegian government office from the 30s.

another dude pops out and asks me and wang xinran if we believe in jesus christ. he looks like a gopher. fat cheeks, deep cardboard colored tan. we don't believe in jesus christ and we can't really explain why but he's polite and barely discouraged and crouches down in front of us and asks me about church in america and who's a christian and what do christians do and the new pope used to be a nazi. his grandfather became a christian fifty years ago and they're part of some underground church. i ask stupid questions about when the world will end and he says something vague about the back of the book and asks if i've read the bible and can i quote something from it. i said the apostles creed, i think, and then our father in french and then xinran and i sang yes jesus loves me in chinese, our own translation (shide shangdi ai wo, shide shangdi ai wo). he says i should convince xinran to become a christian and that i could be a missionary even if i don't believe in god and then he runs away and says over his shoulder that we'll meet again if god wants it.

oh but

yantai is full of korean sex tourists. that's an important detail.

around the ferry terminals. big boats come straight from incheon and there's a hastily constructed border town. ferry terminal tijuana in the middle of a nice city with a wal-mart and gopher-like christians and lots of fat, nice people with white skin and school uniforms patterned after sailor suits. a row of shacks covered in korean characters and the conspicuous korean dudes (they all have grey hair, what's the deal with that? japanese guys too).

they sell dogmeat, cooked korean style. and WEIRD chinese medicine. i'm cool with chinese medicine now but they sell some weird-ass shit that nobody but korean sex tourists fuck with. chinese medicine boner pills made from some animals i never heard of, weird miniature elks and furry seals and shit. and, obv., tons of hookers.

shandong country girls, all of them. big, broad, flat faces and the accents, shouting up and down the alley and across to other girls. leaning in doorways or sitting in windows. tight shiny dresses with their titties pushed way up, opening their legs to flash dark black bush and smiling crazy-ass smiles. or rocking some lingerie or just some dirty-ass t-shirt and panties, leering and shouting at people behind purple windows. crazy shit.

i said, "woah, a fat one. look at the fat girl. did you see?"

and xinran said, "i'm glad i knew china was like this... or i'd be sad."

we also saw a dead kitten.

A thread for the ages already.

who is xinran?

around the international ferry terminal, there is the korean tijuana. that's on one side. on the other side, around the domestic terminal, the ferries from down the coast or across the bohai, a sort of temporary city of scavenged bricks and corrugated metal and fiberglass and plastic tarps. cooking fires. streets of mud and garbage. goats. tiny square gardens. rows of tall corn and sunflowers. little kids shitting in alleys and the same flatfaced women from the korean tijuana whore shacks. same as around most train stations.

it's cool looking at the ferry maps, how you can go basically anywhere in the world. you can get a ferry from here to incheon and go from there to japan and down and down all the way to australia, out through the south pacific, all from yantai, the tip of shandong. but we're just going across the bohai sea to dalian.

everyone on the boat clomps up a shitty metal staircase, all have teh same ticket, common. then, on board you rush to upgrade, if you need to. if not, you stake out a seat. then, if you're out of luck you can wait for some people to go watch the coast disappear and steal their staked out seat. most of the migrant workers get ready right away, taking a spot on the floor if they can't get anything else, stripping to their undies and spreading out a sheet of newspaper, getting their red-white-and-blue bag positioned as a pillow.

xinran and i didn't feel like staking shit out (because we hate staking shit out) or getting a cabin (because we were broke), so we just chilled outside, on the deck. we claimed a bench and watched the lights of yantai disappear, men throwing hotdogs to seagulls.

it was cold. late summer. really cold in the middle of the bohai. crazy icecold winds and shit. crazy ice cold winds alternating with the warm exhaust from the diesel motors.

the deck is full for the first while.

a couple from henan, a skeezy dude in his 50s, basic chinese businessman outfit with the big glasses and shirt buttoned up and the shitbrown slacks and pointy leather shoes and a renovated woman his own age with a thin red dress to her mid-thighs whipping around in the wind. they stand at the rail and take pictures together with his phone. he makes the ch-chikkkkk sound everytime. then they hug really tight and look at each other with wild eyes and he whispers to her and they do the wild eyes more and then he breaks the tension by singing some country nursery rhyme song and making her laugh and glance around. then she keeps saying she's cold and he keeps laughing a crazy chattering laugh.

a country boy with a big, stiff haircut comes out and leans on the railing with arms all covered in webby veins and cigarette burn scars and the dude that was singing to himself softly in japanese behind us on the stairway onto the boat is behind him, taking his picture, a fat old japanese dude with jiang zemin glasses and dockers and a battered cowboy hat type thing and a huge-ass expensive camera and eyes that never blink creepiness.

everyone else on the deck for the long haul is drinking. usually those tall green bottles of er guo tou (usually 1 kuai a bottle on sale, for the small bottles, 5 or 6 for the big bottles, so you can get alcohol poisoning-level fucked up for less than a dollar, and the cheapest smokes cost 2 kuai, so you're set) or huge torpedoes of beer, throwing the empties overboard, sometimes accidentally smashing them on the deck below. from time to time, someone in a uniform will come to tell them that they can't drink and smoke there.

xinran and i write a message in a bottle because she's never been on a boat before and i haven't been on one since i went across the english channel when i was 15 and we both have never written a message in a bottle. we both write, "we're on a boat from yantai to dalian. right midway, we think. we're in love and we just got married because of it. our names are dylan and wang xinran. send us an e-mail or call us." i wrote it in english and french and she wrote it in chinese and japanese. i let her throw it into the water because i was too scared to stand beside the railing.

we ate snickers and roast chicken we bought at the wal-mart in yantai to stay awake but eventually we both sort of passed out, curled up awkwardly on the bench, then woke up, tried to move so that our heads were outside the invisible waterfall of diesel exhaust so we could breathe but our bodies were still warmed and inside. and we woke up with our skin all sticky and dry.

we wanted to see the sun rising on the ocean but we didn't. were too late and it rose in the hills behind dalian.

CHAPTER 2

taking the shuttle bus from the ferry in dalian to the train station, you could be in like edmonton or somewhere. green suburbs full of low beige apartments and car washes and old powerplants from the 1920s and jaguar dealerships and neat little traffic circles. it's cold and the air smells like the ocean.

we stayed in a shit hotel near the train station, an ancient building, hundred years old, but recently repainted, bright yellow over black mold and cracks, seventh floor up a narrow twisty staircase on the outside of the building. out the window, we could see another ferry terminal, domestic departures for yantai and weihai , and a few rows of sleazy bars painted in pastel colors with heikeken/carlsberg/budweiser/asahi bubble signs and no windows, and the occasional also pastel painted foot massage joint slid in between them and covered in japanese or circles and squares korean robot eskimo writing, and sex shops full of big hard plastic cocks and fake pussies. conspicuous koreans (grey hair, fat) wandering up and down and around, darting into fake pussy stores and massage joints. fuckin koreans.

the place is nice, though. real pretty. a product of being flipped between russia and japan over the years. you can go see the old mansions of the japanese section, if you're into that. or wander around downtown with the crazy kamikaze antique tram ripping thru congested up streets that run between gigantic euro style stone castles that used to be banks, recently gutted and replaced with the corporate headquarters of WA HA HA. and you can picture the japanese occupiers from chinese films here, a big rocketship limo pulling up and a hitler mustached jap getting out in his imperial uniform and lots of bowing.

we didn't know what to do. we went to the beach, took the tram there, empty except for some old folks from haerbin that were hiding a weiner dog in the old lady's purse, walked down to the beach in the rain and rented a two-person bike (my first time on a two person bike!) and the beach was covered in cigarette butts and broken glass so we took the tram downtown.

we ate sushi at a hole-in-the-wall place between a sex shop and a korean sex tourist bar. it was full of drunk japanese businessmen and our waitress spoke chinese just like the japanese ghouls in the communist war movies, all strained and full of unnecessary pauses and ready for her to start shouting glory to the emperor, fuckin japanese, and we got a fuckin bathtub of ice covered in fish we've never heard of, nothing but ice and fish and vinegar and soy sauce and our bottle of mint sprite.

then, uh, what else? we bought some cherries. we accidentally found a russian bar in the bottom of a half-ass restored orthodox church.

we sat beside a guy that looked like a trance dj or an f1 driver, baggy stiff leather jacket and shaved head and fat baby face with urine color big-ass blade visor sunglasses and a girl that looks like every russian girl ever, fat lips and flareside f150 cheekbones and sharkfin nose and everything, with huge cubes of rockhard fake breast in her tiny black sequin-y dress. we ordered deepfried steaks covered in cheese because that's what the trance dj and his girlfriend had, and two tsingtaos. and every motherfucker in the place was russian as fuck. a table full of guys that looked like vladmir konstantinov sitting under a stage where a dude that looked like a sunday school music teacher was doing some folksongs on an acoustic guitar, getting all passionate about it and some disco lights sweeping over him in blues and greens and reds, glowing on his bald head.

we ate our deepfried cheese steaks and a guy that was at the bar, skinny, half a beard and crazy eyes, miami vice blowy shirt buttoned wrong and halfway up his stomach-- that guy goes up and jumps behind the keyboard on stage and starts givin 'er balls, jamming, and setting off some turbo grafx 16 type drum machine beat and the folk song sunday school guy is in on it too. and from the private rooms at the back come steaming teams of russian women, all over six feet tall, just under 3 bills apiece, big girls, swooping and stepping around the dancefloor. the konstantinov guys that are drinking a bottle of vodka and then a round of black coffee and then a bottle of vodka get up too, dragged out by the massive women and make a show of picking them up and swooping and stepping around with them in their arms and juggling them around like chubby toddlers, tossing them up and down.

and one of the konstantinov guys sits down beside us, starts speaking russian really fast. and he was really drunk. "i don't understand." and this is our conversation:

"my english is not good. where are you from?"

"san francisco, U-S-A."

"ehhhhhhh."

"you?"

"russia."

he was very easy to upset. he was still angry about alaska, for fuck's sake. i've never met any russians before but i had no idea they were still upset about alaska. and this guy worked in north korea and had a whole routine about how he slept with a north korean folk singer and "her pussys... ehhhhh...ehhhh-hehehehe... ehhh" and he said nuclear weapons were good but north korea were broke as a joke and couldn't pay him, or something. and he insulted us for drinking tsingtao but still called xinran "madam" and tried to kiss her hand (he sort of touched his forehead to her palm) and said we had to drink russian vodka, in a funny russian voice, and grabbed the bottle of finlandia off his table and i asked if finlandia wasn't from finland, not russian vodka, and he ignored me and asked if i knew some russian i'd never heard of and told another bawdy story about him and the punchline was something about the guy's dick getting cut off. and during this whole time we're drinking shots of vodka but he always apologizes and sips my tsingtao to stop from vomiting. this lasted a few hours, then he went to the bathroom and didn't come back. russians are retarded.

then we took a train to beijing.

beijing. you know. i've been there a bunch of times and still never seen tiananmen square or the great wall. the first time i came to china i landed in beijing and changed my money and had no clue what anything was worth and stayed in a wicked hotel on wangfujing and it was like 40+ degrees and YELLOW outside and i had a threesome with two hookers from the hotel's in-house whorehouse and i bought nikes and ate scorpions and walked around the gucci store gawking at things. but this time... nothing. beijing was just a quick night in an overpriced hotel room and it was still 40+ degrees and YELLOW outside and we didn't have the heart to book another hotel room and wander around beijing, so we got our train tickets and left, a train 10 hours south to xuzhou.

xuzhou is my hometown. i lived there awhile. i met my wife there. i speak perfect local dialect. i know the place excellent. it's the biggest city in jiangsu, a big 2 million people mess right where shandong and jiangsu meet, way up north so it's not in the orbit of shanghai or nanjing. a big, messy city with air that smells like diesel and stagnant water.

we ran into some friends right away, this dude i know and his new girlfriend.

he's like 34 or something, from louisiana, has a master's degree in english literature and has lived in china for 5 years and his only connection to america is the monthly parcel of chewing tobacco his mom sends him. he loves chewin. he's the boss of a private school. he's an alcoholic and abuses prescription drugs and always has bags of ketamine on him. all of his employees (drunk-ass 24 year olds from texas and northern england) also abuse ketamine and take a relaxed attitude toward work. he had a chinese girlfriend for three, four years, but then she came across a dvd of him fucking this pale, wormy british girl on their bed. he showed me that dvd. he had a bunch more. his favorite was him and one of his employees from texas (dude looked like bobby hill) taking turns on a fat prostitute they befriended and got crabs from. his name is scott.

his new girlfriend is a local girl, tough and ugly, with a tattoo of a scorpion on her arm. her name is ma li.

we went to eat a ghetto hotpot place downtown. xinran went to see her family.

this place is incredible. just a sidewalk on the edge of a construction site. then, steel bowls and propane flames. bowls of hot red oil and platters of vegetables, lamb roll-ups, mushrooms, a million bean curd products. you know, hot pot. and beer is 1 kuai a bottle during the winter and free during the summer. great deal. the place is sort of at the intersection of the girl streets, all those narrow alleys where girls sit in windows that glow purple and pink and have doors with frosted glass, and some streets with more legit massage places. so, the place is full of girls in white massage parlor uniforms and short skirts and crazy shit, all of them tatted up with dragons and beijing opera singers on their backs. etc. etc.

there's a screen and a ktv machine at one end and girls get up to sing during dinner. the first girl does some crazy fist-pumping folk song rock opera shit and everyone goes crazy. the song is by jiang zemin's secret second wife, a famous folk singer that does these joints. cool. and there's a discussion at the next table about jiang zemin and one girl passionately defends him before everyone else realizes she's talking about zhu rongji. funny.

here's a joke about zhu rongji:

president bush, sr. said to zhu rongji, put us in charge of china and in three months you'll have human rights, democracy, and one other thing, i forget.

and zhu rongji says to bush, we'll give you three guys from henan and in three days america will be GONE.

this place is in a construction site, basically. the bathroom is a mud pit in the back. that's it. i go back and stand on a cinderblock and piss into the mud in the dark and watch girls hiking up their skirts and squatting to shit and piss, smiling up at me from the mud. scott takes pictures with his phone.

scott and ma li invite me along to a sorta fancy karaoke joint downtown. when we get there, it's her family, a bunch of tough old aunties and some skinny dudes drinking pengcheng beer, eating popcorn, singing the same sort of arena rock folk songs as at the ghetto hotpot. they like me. i can speak chinese. i dance really dirty with a woman who's about 45 and talks shit about everyone when they leave our private room. i sing brown eyed girl and when a man loves a woman and go to take a piss. scott is getting into it with a guy in the bathroom. he speaks chinese, really good, amazing vocabulary, but no pronunciation, so it's local dialect plus louisiana accent plus sorta like a deaf person talking, so it's funny shit to hear. i play it cool and leave out.

i get back to the room and everyone is still at it. scott and the dude come back and for some reason, the dude leaves and says some shit and scott starts yelling at him in english, so nobody but i can understand, unhelpfully. then, they go outside and start to fight. i figure it's a good idea to grab scott and he punches me in the gut and i drag him to the floor, and everyone's freaking out and everyone has come out of their private room. so, i take him back into our room and i say, "well, we should get going" and he doesn't like that idea. we smoke a cigarette and drink a beer and the door swings open and a girl i've never seen before starts swearing at us and scott charges out after her and i grab him again and suggest that we get going. when we get out, everyone's on us, trying to pin us against the wall, keep us there, but fuck it, we just stroll out, smackin niggas around. scott is a stupid motherfucker.

in the parking lot, we get into a taxi and scott vomits on the floor, so we get another one. and this one won't go because everyone is blocking it, telling the taxi driver that teh police are coming. the taxi driver was straight so he just revved the engine and drove through everyone.

we took a taxi to his apartment and drank beers and smoked cigarettes and watched a dvd of him fucking his girlfriend, both of them taking breaks to snort ketamine, then i flicked thru his dvds and said i'd never seen braveheart. we've done this before. he always forgets because he's an alcoholic. when i say that i've never seen braveheart, he gets upset because he loves the film and he's an alcoholic and i start needling him, saying it's just an american movie, because then he puts it in and i don't have to watch homemade sex dvds.

that's my first day in xuzhou.

the book will slowly get more romantic and less chaotic and violent.

have the movie rights been optioned?

this thread rules

the vice guide to that crazy china

my mom says there's a lot of black people in china

― max r

lol this thread