Chongqing: Hate

Children playing after hours in the markets.

Chongqing is a huge city. So big in fact that it joins both Beijing and Shanghai as the three cities in China that are so large they are designated as provinces unto themselves. But unlike Shanghai and Beijing, this city is not here for high business or government. This is a working city, built on the banks of the Yangtze River, and the beneficiary of the Three Gorges Dam, China's latest and greatest controversial technological development. 

People in this city are strong. The hills and mountains in the city are so steep and jut so violently out of the earth that no one around here has bikes. Bikes would be useless on terrain that makes the hills of San Francisco look like sand dunes. This means that rather than transporting goods around the city on the back of peddle carts, as most things are in all other parts in China, here the people act as their own pack animals, carrying 80-pound loads on their backs up endless stairs and unforgiving hills with pure muscle. Even the women carry carts and wheelbarrows, leaving them with tight arm and hard bodies. It looks for all the world like millions of Chinese body-builders walking the streets, shirtless and ripped.

An angry meat vendor in one of the many underground food markets of Chongqing.

All this takes place as the city developing faster than any other city in a country that is developing faster than any other country in the world. There is construction going on everywhere. Bridges that span the whole city are built alongside high-rises that seem to grow five floors in a single day. People are working 24 hours a day. Sparks from welders rain down on the unprotected streets.   

After marveling at the amazing hills, the historic river, and the strength of the people, though, you are left with the one, ever-present, trait of the city: it is dirty. Not simply dusty or polluted, but so dripping in grease, human waste, and construction debris that your senses are assaulted at all times. This place is known as the Cloudy City because of the fog that never lifts, though now the fog is all a dingy brown color and is so thick on an average day you cannot see across to the other side of the Yangtze, a modestly large river the size of the Willamette River in Portland. 

Midnight fishing on the Yangtze River. Downtown Chongqing.

Every dark corner has been used as a bathroom so that at times there are smells so thick that it feels like you are walking through tear gas. Fumes get in your mouth and your clothes. You can still smell it even when you’re exhaling. Street lamps above the street-food carts have dripping, caked-on layers of grease as black and thick as the shit someone has taken on the sidewalk illuminated by faded yellow light. To put it bluntly, this is the worst place I've ever seen in China

A sunny day on the Yangtze River.

To be fair, a lot of things contributed to this opinion of mine besides the city itself. I could write them out as a story but I think instead I'll just make a list in the order that the events occurred. Be aware that it is a graphic list.

1. Spent three days on the train from Shanghai in a cramped little compartment.  Every time people walked by they’d look in and stare at us as if we were caged animals in the zoo. Tryg yelled at some teenage girls who were flashing a powerful LED light in our faces when everyone else on the train was trying to sleep. We arrived in Chongqing at 4 am.

2. On the train for those three days all I had to eat were instant noodles, which left me constipated. 

3. Having not pooped in days, Tryg, some Chinese people, and I went out for a night of fun and very heaving drinking of very light beer. The next morning I woke up with a hemorrhoid the size of a small planet, and a persistent cough. These two things lasted for days and worked very much against each other.

4. Tryg and I went to a dirty restaurant—the only kind we ever go to in China—and we both got food poisoning that lasted for a few days, thus ruining all Chinese food.

5. The people in the Chongqing stare at us constantly, more than in any other city I’ve ever been to in China, and they all shout “hello!” constantly—not in a fun friendly way, but as if they are poking us with sharp sticks from across the street to see what we’ll do.

6. The girls running the hostel are argumentative and unhelpful.

Ian, forced into multicultural photo op. Liberation Square, Chongqing.

7. People here are trying to take you for everything you’ve got. You have to fight day in and day out, even if you’re just buying an apple, or soap. There is no escape, and I start wanting to punch everyone.

All this culminated on the day when Tryg and I both had long sessions in the hostel bathroom, which had only one mostly-broken sit-down toilet, as opposed to the far more common squatter toilets that the Chinese usually use. 

This same day, at this precise time, all our friends and family back home were sitting down to eat Thanksgiving dinner with each other. We had no turkey, no cheese, and no bread. All we had was our one hundredth bowl of noodles and greasy vegetables. We hated China more that day than I’ve ever hated any place before. 

The hostel lobby was arranged using some kind of anti-fengshui. Despite numerous couches and chairs, there were absolutely no comfortable places to sit. We just started walking around talking about everything that we hated in this god-awful place. We reminisced about the things we missed back home—the food, the people; we wanted to do anything comforting because right now there was nothing comfortable in our lives. At times we would break into manic laughter, giddy with rage at how horrible everything we saw was. We swore openly at anyone who tried to sell us something, glared angrily at everyone who shouted “hello.”  China, we concluded, was fucked.

Chefs taking a smoke break in front their alleyway restaurant.

As all this happened, I got a call from the person we’d come to Chongqing to meet, an old friend of mine from the last time I was in China. Tina, for those who know the story, is Rye’s best friend. And though I’ve been racking my brain trying to describe what that might mean, I don’t really think there’s anything I have to say on the issue. 

We’d gone to lunch with Tina previously, and at that time she’d invited us to go to her friends’ wedding. We were excited to go at first, but now in our current state of mind we were not at all interested in being social. I told her we had decided not to go. I was not expecting to be so upset. It wasn’t long before I gave in to her disappointed pleas. Tryg, listening to the phone conversation and my crumbling resolve, mimed how unhappy he was. 

The wedding was very strange. I’d been to other Chinese weddings in the past, but I’d never been to a wedding in a Christian church. China, as a country, is loud. In everyday life people yell on the street, play their music without concern for others, and honk their horns constantly. But even I was surprised while sitting in the church when no one paid attention to the woman who came to the pulpit and began asking everyone who had gathered in the church to be quiet. In fact, they seemed to speak louder. As the bride and groom said their vows people shouted at each other across the aisle. One guy's cell phone rang, and he promptly answered it.  Luckily, the service was short, and even more luckily, the food was next.

If Tina had not been so insistent that we go to the wedding, then we never would have gone to the reception, and if we hadn’t gone to the reception it’s possible Tryg and I would have never felt good for the rest of our lives. It was held in the Chongqing opera house, where they had a huge buffet set up with every kind of food, and most importantly, Western food. There was cheesecake, pizza, pasta, snails and caviar. There was French food, Italian food, American BBQ; there was even blue cheese strong enough to make your ears ring. It felt like our Thanksgiving. 

Tina has her first experience with blue cheese.

It’s still China, though, and when I almost got sick at the fist sip of what I thought was a glass of Cabernet, I asked Tina to taste it. “Oh that's red wine mixed with Pepsi,” she said without batting an eye. Fuckin’ China, I said to myself for the umpteenth time that week. 

That meal didn’t instantly cure us of our bitter China hate though. We continued to marinate in anti-Chongqing bile right up until the morning that we left, when I (observing proper Chinese culture) shoved a number of old grandmas out of the way to squeeze through the bottleneck gate and get to our train first. Tryg simply jumped over the fence. 

Heading to Chengdu in the cheap crowded seats, the man across from me asked me what I was going to do in Sichuan. I pretended I couldn’t speak Chinese and went to sleep.

The serious kite fliers come out to the harbor to do their thing.

Before I go, I want to tell you all that if you’re still reading this, it’s awesome.  I know a lot of you have written comments. I am reading them. Even though I can’t get to the blog because of the internet blocks in China, when you leave a comment I get an e-mail telling me what you’ve written. I’m trying to figure out a way that I can respond to the things you are saying without putting anymore strain on Lupin, who is already doing a ton of work on this blog, editing and compiling everything even while she is in the midst of finals and her job.

The other thing that I want to ask now, as a favor, is that you tell your friends about this blog. I know it’s a bit specialized—maybe not everyone in the world would be interested in what is happening with me and Tryg on this trip—but I do want this thing to continue to grow. I wanted to wait to make this request till I’d already gotten a number of blog entries written and posted, so that you all could decide if it is in fact something that you enjoy, and then you can decide if you’d be willing to recommend it to a friend. So if you do like it, please spread it around. 

And one very last thing. What's up? I know most of you, and even if I don’t, I want to hear about life back home or wherever you are. Leave comments, and I’ll read them all no matter how long they are. What adventures are you having? What is changing in the little parts of the world that I might not be hearing about?

Halved carp await a buyer.

Catfish tank in the underground fish market.