Below Belief

This morning it seems our appetite for sightseeing has finally been sated. We were going to climb up the mountain today and experience great views down into the valley but a tragic lethargy has overcome us. We have saturated our desires for Chinese temples, pagodas, mountains and tourist spots. All we want to do now is what is so easy to do here in Dali, relax, lay back, eat, shop and read a good book. We have so little time left here and yet it seems to stretch before us like a new month. We have done the travelling bit and now we are stationary, it seems we must do the ‘holiday’ bit too. Our wish to rest is almost a reaction to the coming few days which will be exhaustively filled with our return travel by the slow, meandering route from Dali to Kunming, Kunming to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Bangkok and finally, Bangkok to home.
Today is shopping day. Yesterday was just a practice. So after a tasty lunch in the Sunshine Cafe we head for the shops. On the agenda today: clothes for us, batiks for the ladies and walking canes for Llew’s dad. Haggling is half the fun and Llew and I specialise in clubbing together to buy two items from one stall-holder and trying it on for a ‘bulk’ discount. The shops seem to offer initial prices around about one a half times too high. General tactics seem to be offer them half what they say first and then converge one what should be about the right price. What adds to the fun is that fact that none of them speak, or claim to speak, any English at all. I purchase a complete outfit, tailored, for about £5. Okay so it’s not quite my normal fashion but it’s comfy, rather Chinese and kind of ethnically cool. They won’t like it back home though.
Next on the list is a painting – a Chinese montage showing what feasibly could have been the gorges shrouded in mist, my most Chinese souvenir and quite special. Llew bargains hard for an ivory walking cane but can’t get her to go as low as she went in practise yesterday. As we walk away we realise we were haggling (and quibbling) over 5 Y – about 40p. It’s the principle which counts.
Next are some Chinese spices for Llew’s ‘Ken-Hom’ brother. We buy bagfuls of unknown substances and kernels and come away with what should be a really interesting and smelly present – if we ever get it through customs. Trying them out later, in a cafe, we find one of the kernels has a lemony taste and if you bite into it, it leaves your mouth numb for ten minutes. Nice! Strong Yunnan coffee is the only thing to put it right.
Llew goes outfit purchasing now. Two Chinese tailor girls reckon they can make some trousers and a top up in his size in 24 hours and laugh uncontrollably when he drops his shorts to be measured. I understand part of their conversation in Chinese, which I can translate roughly for you here: ‘…I’ve never seen anything so small,’ said one with a giggle. Batik shopping proves trickiest of all – there are so many to choose from. Eventually we collect a few pieces together into a rather nice selection. Then we grow tired of all this shopping and behaving like women so we head back for a cup of tea and a rest like old men instead. Our insatiable desire for reading leads us to trade in our fiction works at a local book exchange in return for far more serious titles like ‘Basic Philosophy with Wittgenstein’ and, slightly less tenuously, ‘Riding the Iron Rooster’ about rail travel in China by Paul Theroux. Both are quite likely to lull us to sleep on the long journey home.
Back at the guesthouse at 11pm, Steve is doing a guitar recital with a Frenchman. They jam together quite tunefully, although their taste is a little narrow. It is good just to sit there, watch the twinkling stars and the lanterns swaying in the breeze and feel a million miles away. Later I find out why Steve seemed so intriguing to my sixth-sense. It turns out he comes from Harrogate like me. He is 39 and has been on the road for seven years. We talk fondly of home and gradually his previously barely discernible Yorkshire accent returns quite heavily. His mum still lives on Leeds Road about 500 yards from my house and apparently she doesn’t understand why her son travels so far and wide. Steve has settled in the last year and now runs a small music teaching business in Hong Kong, travelling in China regularly.
He has a 20 year old Chinese-Bai girlfriend in Dali for whom he obviously cares a lot. However, maintaining a girlfriend in China as a Westerner is extremely difficult and girlfriends are extraordinarily difficult to export. Steve has a very interesting viewpoint on China. He is far more widely travelled than either of us, clearly likes the country but has seen a side to China – the side his girlfriend lives in – which we haven’t. It is the side full of the weak-minded, vulgar, nouveau-riche Chinese whose culture has been torn to shreds and bombarded by external pressures.
Although his opinion should wisely be taken with a pinch of salt, it is clear that many parts of China’s society are rapidly descending into a mire of prostitution, corruption, drugs and HIV. We ourselves have seen the prominence of the late night ‘barbers shops’, ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ and ‘karaoke’ bars. Their growth rate has been astronomical. Dali now has 25 dodgy karaoke bars with all the implications for local womens’ exploitation, compared to only two last year. The government generally blames the rise in prostitution on an influx of rich Western tourists. In fact it is the increase in Chinese tourism coupled with the culture here which leads to using prostitutes as a status symbol of wealth.
It seems Chinese men treat their women with very little respect – particularly pretty ones. Girls from local rural villages support their families by working in the cities under terrible conditions. And with a population rise drastically favouring male children 145:100 at the last count, thanks to widespread female infanticide, the problem of a dominant and violent male culture looks set only to get worse. We have seen glimpses of the vulgarity of the Chinese mind-set but this gives a whole new angle on a dark and sinister China. Even the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) is corrupt. They run many of the old state owned industries to pay for the defence of the country. Apparently with money, anyone can hire out a division of the army to put to their own personal use. Money is power and, in China, that means dangerous times ahead.

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