Sunday, April 06, 2008

Spit and Polish

There’s been a lot of goings-on in the city this weekend.  The police have begun raiding the hooker bars and closing them down.  They went out and arrested a bunch of drug dealers this weekend.  This, along with the smoking ban and the dog meat ban, is being done for one reason only—the Olympics.

The expats here figure the next things to be shut down will be the fashion markets, where they sell all the knock-off merchandise.  The DVD stores will be raided and closed, too.  The world’s focus is on China already because of the unrest in you-know-where.  The last thing they want is the world media flooding into Beijing and seeing stories about hookers, drugs, pirate DVDs, and all that stuff.  These things all take place out in the open, so it wouldn’t be hard for some enterprising reporter to go out looking for these types of stories.

It sucks for those of us who live here.  By and large, the expats who come here do so out of a sense of adventure.  We like things the way they are.  You have quite a bohemian existence here, and it’s what makes living in China tolerable.  Think of all the shit you have to put up with here—the language barrier, the pollution, the taxis, the cultural oddities, the inconvenience of having to pre-pay all your bills, and so on.  What makes it bearable is the low cost of living and the nightlife.  Even if you don’t take drugs or utilize the hookers they were always a fixture of life here.  It’s fun being propositioned by hookers, and striking up a conversation with them. 

An example:  One night a friend of mine was talking to a Mongolian hooker and he asked her if she had come to Beijing specifically to become a prostitute.  A scowl crossed her face and she became indignant.  “No!  I was prostitute in Mongolia, I am prostitute in Beijing, and I will ALWAYS be prostitute!” This was her chosen profession, and she was proud of it.  Where else do you get to have conversations like this?  I’ve talked to drug dealers from Ghana and Nigeria, and they tell me about their lives back home, the hookers talk about Mongolia or Russia or wherever they come from.  It’s just… interesting.  It’s one thing to talk to a college educated guy from Germany who’s over here working in the banking industry, but it’s another entirely to hear a prostitute talk about how she’s here supporting her entire family back home, how she makes more in one night than her father earns in a month.  It allows you to see into different worlds, especially the seedy parts of those words, the parts that aren’t in guidebooks, which you can’t take a tour bus to visit.  This is the part of life, the parts of the world, that fascinate me. 

In a way, there’s a feeling of resentment among many of the expats.  I know I feel it.  My friends and I were talking about this the other night.  We came here in part to escape the puritanical nature of life in the west—the health nazis, the safety police, and so on.  I’ve described life here as oddly libertarian many times.  All these things, the hookers and DVD shops, have been technically illegal, but they were tolerated because it kept the people happy, and they really weren’t much of a problem.  But now, because of the Olympics, we’re going to have to adhere to the pathetic moral strictures of the west.  A bunch of whining tourist jerks, who would never have the courage to do something like move to China, are going to come here for the Olympics, and those of us who live here, who love our lives in this wonderful city, are going to have to do without because of it.

There’s no doubt that once the Olympics are over, and all the worthless tourists go back home to their safe little enclaves in America and Europe, flush with souvenirs and Chairman Mao t-shirts and photos of themselves at the Great Wall, Beijing’s bohemian nature will return.  Life will become normal here again.

But this really goes to show why so much of the world resents the cultural hegemony of the west, especially the United States.  People here are going to be forced to adhere to the values and cultural norms of tourists.  (If you don’t understand why this would breed resentment, imagine if you had to spend four months in your own city living according to the cultural mores of France.) The reason for this is quite simple—most people in the west are too backwards and ignorant of the rest of the world to be able to accept the fact that life here is different.  Smoking is a great example.  People here like to smoke.  It’s an integral part of the Chinese restaurant lifestyle and cultural zeitgeist.  But now, because some dickheads from Ohio or Norway or Australia are going to come here and wave flags and chant the names of their respective countries, the Chinese are going to have to change their lives accordingly.  You think this isn’t going to piss people off?

It’s a big game of self-deception on both sides.  The Chinese government is going to pretend that these things have never existed.  The tourists are going to pretend that they wouldn’t have bought pirate DVDs or knock-off handbags.  The world media will report on what a wonderful, clean (and going green!), modern city Beijing is, and the government will point out all the steps they’re taking to modernize and be more like the west.  It’s all horseshit, but I can understand why the Chinese government is doing it.  People from the west are self-righteous bastards.  “Ewww.  It was terrible.  They were smoking everywhere, and when you drive down the street you can see so-called hair salons with pink lights around the door.  Those are whorehouses, right there off the street!  Why, my Jimmy actually saw one of them, and he’s only 15!  My poor, delicate wallflower of a son actually laid eyes on a prostitute for two seconds as we walked past, his life is ruined!  Not to mention that we went into a bar and I think there was someone smoking hash or marijuana in there.  Yeah, drugs!  We all know that one whiff of marijuana smoke will turn you into an addict, and there were some foreigners in a bar, doing it right in the open!”

If you’re going to go an experience a foreign culture, take the good with the bad.  But tourists don’t want that, they want the sanitized, Disneyland-style foreign experience.  They want to eat Chinese food and get their picture taken in Tiananmen Square, but other than that they want it to be exactly like it is back home.  They’ll never know what it’s really like to be a part of a foreign culture.  The culture has to bend over for them, because they don’t like the icky smell of cigarettes.

It sucks.  But, like all things, this too shall pass.  Until then, I’d like to give a warm and healthy FUCK YOU to anyone who plans on attending the Olympics.  Thanks for nothing.  After you leave, those of us who live here are going to have to deal with the mess you create.