The funny side of travelling through China
The first thing that strikes you about China is its size. For a country that is huge, expansive and wide-skied, its people are quite petite. Women especially, and they come in all shapes of tiny. The second thing that strikes you is that the Chinese really don’t care about anything happening beyond the Chinese border. Forty days must be the longest I’ve gone without a newspaper. Thank heavens for VPN (virtual private network) or I’d have been as free from Twitter, Facebook and blogs as from world news.
A fondness for ‘Pajikistan’ makes you feel welcome in China (rare for Pakistanis anywhere else in the world except, perhaps, Turkey). The Chinese judgment is clouded by our ‘higher than the Himalayas and sweeter than honey’ friendship. Between my last holiday to China (last year) and this one – I have travelled a bit between Beijing, Xi’an, Chengdu and Shenzhen – my being Pakistani has awarded me an instant smile from the locals and, in some cases, a chilled bottle of mineral water, too — which is a rarity there. The Chinese do not drink cold water or hot tea.
On a road trip to Leshan, several hundred miles outside Chengdu, to see the world’s largest Buddha statue, our guide Seth very innocently announced, “Pakistan used to have the largest standing Buddha until the Americans blew it apart.” To correct him by saying that the Buddhas in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, were bombed by the Taliban was useless. To most Chinese, the US is the axis of evil and I was all too happy to play along with Seth’s naiveté. Make hay while the sun shines, as our prime minister would have said.
Emmit, the Abercrombie & Fitch model outside the brand’s flagship store in Hong Kong, was just as refreshingly unaware of how brilliantly our country is marketed on the nine o’ clock news every evening. “I really want to visit Pakistan,” he told me, “because everything is either made in China or Pakistan these days.” I did try and elucidate on the security situation but his response (“Isn’t that Iraq and Afghanistan?”) shut me up. Why take away his rosy specs?
China and Pakistan (and their sweeter-than-honey friendship) is just one part of the story. You have to be in China to appreciate the diversity within this nation. It has over 3,000 years of history and yet the Chinese eye and spirit for progression looks ahead another couple of thousand years just as easily.
It’s a country where religion may have taken a backseat but where feng shui and chi (positive energy) play a corroborative role in people’s everyday lives. So many buildings are constructed without 90-degree outer angles simply for good luck. Hong Kong property prices hike because of the perfect yin yang setting of the mountain against the water. People believe that’s the core of Hong Kong’s prosperity. Life in China is about striking the perfect yin and yang. It helps the nation stay alive.
“How old are your parents?” asked Louis, our very worried guide in Xi’an as she helped us climb 40 steps of the City Wall. We all huffed and puffed while the Chinese octogenarians, possibly even centurions, hopped, skipped and jumped by, some on their bikes, others in their walking shoes, dancing to Tai Chi movements on the roadside and staying generally fit, happy, and (often annoyingly) optimistic.
All these differences apart, the Chinese are a lot like us. They may be protecting the Giant Panda in Chengdu but at a circus in Guangzhou every possible animal was being exploited in acts that the developed world would condemn for animal cruelty. The roads are perfectly paved but the cabbies are constantly on their phones, chatting away and ignoring the law until a policeman comes within sight. Most of the phones, mind you, are counterfeit and openly available at the world’s biggest counterfeit flea market, Louhou.China has seen and overcome odds. What can we do to achieve their kind of optimism and drive? Put religion on the back burner and kill a couple of million people, as Mao did?
That would be seeing the glass half empty, as we’re all too used to doing in Pakistan. What I see here is a nation with the will to work hard. If a country six times our size can do it, there’s no reason why we can’t too. But who’s going to enforce the law about having one child, one pet and one servant? That may be a challenge.
Aamna Haider Isani is a writer who enjoys fashion, travelling, blogging and talking to all kinds of people.