Dave Barry - Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up

Getting back on the bus, my son has an insight. “Really,” he says, “all kids are in a communism country, because they have to obey orders and they get pushed around.”

I agree that this is true, but he will still have to take out the garbage.

Now John is telling us how this city came to be called “the mouth of the snake.” It’s a long, old legend involving a snake that came here on a rainy day and turned into a beautiful woman (why not?), and a man lent her his umbrella, and they fell in love, and then needless to say this attracted the attention of the Underwater Dragon King. It’s a very complex legend, and I hope there isn’t going to be a quiz. Outside the window we see a large group of dogs, all tethered to a post, looking around with the standard earnest, vaguely cheerful dog expression. Some men are looking the dogs over, the way supermarket shoppers look over tomatoes. John is back on the endlessly fascinating topic of the Special Economic Zone, telling us how many square kilometers it is. This is not what I’m wondering about. What I’m wondering is: Are they going to eat those dogs? But I don’t ask, because I don’t really want to know. Now we’re going through a security checkpoint, leaving the Special Economic Zone and its many freedoms. Now we’re in the real People’s Republic, which makes the Special Economic Zone look like Epcot Center. Everywhere there are half-finished buildings, seemingly abandoned years ago in midconstruction, some of them with laundry hanging in them. There are also people everywhere, but nobody seems to be doing anything. I admit this is purely an impression, but it’s a strong one. The primary activities seem to be:

1. Seeing how many bundles you can pile on a bicycle and still ride it, and

2. Sitting around.

We go through a line of tollbooths—our booth was manned by six people—and get on an extremely surreal expressway. Picture a major, semi-modern, four-lane, interstate-type highway, except that it has every kind of vehicle—mostly older trucks and buses, but also motorcycles, tractors, bicycles with bundles piled incredibly high, even hand-drawn carts. Also you come across the occasional water buffalo, wandering along. Yes! Water buffalo! On the interstate! Bear in mind that this is the industrially advanced region of China.

Of course, all the vehicles, including the water buffalo, freely use both lanes. So our bus is constantly weaving and honking, accelerating to a top speed of about 45 miles per hour, then suddenly dropping to zero. We pass a truck with a flat tire; somebody has removed the wheel and thoughtfully left it in the traffic lane. We pass an overturned pig truck, with the pigs still in it, looking concerned. A group of people has gathered to sit around and watch. We pass two more overturned trucks, each of which has also attracted a seated audience. Maybe at some point the trucks here just spontaneously leap up and right themselves, and nobody wants to miss it.

All the while, John is talking about square kilometers and metric tons, but we tourists are not paying attention. We’re staring out the window, fascinated by the highway drama.

After about an hour we arrive in Dongguang, where we’re going to stop for lunch.

“People here like to eat poisonous snakes,” John informs us. This makes me nervous about what we’re having for lunch, especially after the scene with the dogs. Plus, I can’t help thinking about an alarming development in Chinese cuisine that I read about a few days earlier in a newspaper story, which I will quote from here:

Beijing (AP)—Health officials closed down 92 restaurants in a single city (Luoyang) for putting opium poppy pods in food served to customers, an official newspaper has reported ... in an attempt to get customers addicted to their food ... health officials started getting suspicious when they saw that some noodle shops and food stalls were attracting long lines of customers while others nearby did little business.

So I’m concerned that they’re going to offer us some delicacy whose name translates to “Poodle and Viper Stew with ‘Can’t Say No’ Noodles.” I’m relieved when John tells us we’re having Peking Duck. We pull up to a hotel and enter the dining room, where, lo and behold, we find that we’ll be dining with the very same sticker-wearing people that we encountered at the museum, the free market, and the kindergarten. This is indeed an amazing coincidence, when you consider how big China reportedly is.

The Peking Duck is pretty good, but not plentiful, only a couple of small pieces per person. John informs us that in China, when you eat Peking Duck, you eat only the skin.

“Sure,” mutters an Australian woman at our table. “And they’ll tell the next group that you eat only the meat.”

After lunch we’re back on the bus, on the road to the major city of Guangzhou, which most Westerners know as Canton. John is pointing out that we are passing many shops, which is true, but the vast majority of them seem to be either (a) permanently under construction or (b) selling used tires.

In a few minutes we encounter dramatic proof that China’s population is 1.1 billion: At least that many people are in a traffic jam with us. I have never seen a traffic jam like this—a huge, confused, gear-grinding, smoke-spewing, kaleidoscopic mass of vehicles, on the road and on the shoulders, stretching for miles and miles, every single driver simultaneously honking and attempting to change lanes. Our driver, Bill, puts on a wondrous show of skill, boldly bluffing other drivers, displaying lightning reflexes and great courage, aiming for spaces that I would not have attempted in a go-kart. Watching him, we passengers become swept up in the drama, our palms sweating each time he makes yet another daring, seemingly impossible move that will, if it succeeds, gain us maybe two whole feet.

We pass an exciting hour and a half this way, finally arriving at the source of the problem, which is, needless to say, a Repair Crew. Providing security are a half-dozen men who look like police officers or soldiers, standing around smoking and talking, ignoring the crazed traffic roiling past them. The work crew itself consists of eight men, seven of whom are watching one man, who’s sitting in the middle of the highway holding a hammer and a chisel. As we inch past, this man is carefully positioning the chisel on a certain spot on the concrete. It takes him a minute or so to get it exactly where he wants it, then, with great care, he raises the hammer and strikes the chisel. I can just barely hear the ping over the sound of the honking. The man lifts the chisel up to evaluate the situation. I estimate that, barring unforeseen delays, this particular repair job should easily be completed in 12,000 years. These guys are definitely qualified to do highway repair in the U.S.

We are running late when we get to Canton, where we have a happy reunion with our fellow sticker-wearing, museum-going duck-skin-eaters from the other buses at the Canton Zoo. I don’t want to sound like a broken record here, but this is a grim and seedy zoo, an Animal’s Republic of China, all cracked concrete and dirty cages. The other zoo-goers seem more interested in us tourists than in the animals, staring as we pass. We’re shepherded to the pandas and the monkeys, then into a special, foreigners-only area to buy souvenirs. I buy my son a little green hat styled like the one Chairman Mao used to wear, with a red star on the front. Radical chic.

Back on the bus, we drive through Canton’s streets, which are teeming with people on bicycles, forming major bicycle traffic jams. Imagine all the bicycles in the world, then double this amount, and you have an idea of Canton at rush hour. We pass a large market, where, John assures us, you can buy any kind of snake you want. Fortunately, we don’t stop; we’re going to see the Temple of the Six Banyans, which no longer has any banyans, although it does have three large brass statues of Buddha, which John claims are the largest brass Buddha statues in Guangzhou Province, and I don’t doubt it for a minute. Next we head for the Dr. Stin Yat-Sen Memorial Hall, which is quite impressive and which boasts the largest brass statue of any kind in Guangzhou Province. Out front is a sign recounting the hall’s history in English, including this mysterious sentence: “In 1988, the Guangzhou municipality had allocated funds for get rid of the hidden electrical danger in the hall Comprehensively.”