Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Wild West
Sichuan Sour
Shannon Mustipher — Glady's, New York Combine one and a half ounces of strong-aroma baijiu with a half ounce of Rum Fire Jamaican Overproof Rum, a half ounce of Giffard Passionfruit Liqueur, and an ounce each of lime juice and pineapple juice. Shake over ice and strain into a coupette.
"The road to Sichuan is hard," wrote the immortal poet Li Bai, "hard as climbing the sky." Sichuan is a world unto itself, cut off from the rest of China by geography, distance, and culture. More than a thousand miles west of where it spills into the East China Sea, the Yangtze River rushes down from the Tibetan Plateau and into southern Sichuan. Its tributaries cut a network of waterways that further isolate the province from the distant eastern coast.
In ancient times the emperor would send wayward officials there as a punishment. Though I would not characterize my time there as burdensome, I ended up there in much the same way.
It started back in 2011. I had just moved back to the United States and married my then longtime girlfriend, Catherine, who had recently accepted a diplomatic position in the United States Foreign Service. And on a mild summer afternoon in Arlington, Virginia, the State Department subjected us to Flag Day, equal parts induction ceremony and hazing ritual.
The auditorium hushed as a short man in his forties, goateed and balding, walked to the podium and introduced a series of distinguished guests. Not a word from their lips registered in a single ear. All eyes were trained not on the lectern but on the rows of tiny flags behind them, each of which represented a country where one of the newly anointed officers might be sent. I sat with Catherine's father and brother in the back of the room, clutching with white knuckles a list of potential landing spots.
Several weeks earlier Catherine brought the list home from training. We spent hours researching and weighing the merits of various potential postings, as if our opinions mattered. A U.S. diplomat's job requires what is euphemistically called "worldwide availability." In reality this means something like, "We'll send you wherever we god-damned please." It's the diplomatic equivalent of being shot from a cannon.
Bangkok would be nice, we thought. So would Tel Aviv or somewhere in Eastern Europe. For reasons that still remain unclear, almost everyone in Catherine's class was pulling for a job in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, possibly because it was fun to say aloud. I had a few ground rules. Places with child soldiers, abnormal levels of ethnic violence, or high likelihood of a grenade attack were low priorities. Second-level concerns included electricity, running water, and malaria. Above all, I didn't want to go to China.
Rather, I didn't want to go back to China. The People's Republic had seemed like the answer to a range of life's questions when I'd first arrived there. I had recently graduated from college and was working a dead-end job in a miserable suburb of Boston, let's call it Waltham (its name), waiting for Catherine to graduate.
In the first decade of the 2000s, U.S. life had reached what then felt like impressive new lows. The economy was bad and, though nobody realized it at the time, about to get much worse. Unilateral warfare and freedom fries were the politics du jour, indignities that feel quaint in retrospect.
Meanwhile, many worlds away, a beacon of hope emanated from an unlikely source. Every day newspapers ran front-page spreads heralding China's "economic miracle" and its seemingly inevitable rise to global supremacy. The twenty-first was to be China's century, they said.
Two of my co-workers had already broken free of their capitalist fetters and bought one-way tickets to the mysterious Communist stronghold. They set sail with a single suitcase and vague promises of English-teaching opportunities. "You should come over," they told me after they arrived. "Get here and the job finds you." It sounded like a dream. Granted, the sum total of my life experience was an impractical philosophy degree buffeted by a cloud of bong smoke, but it still seemed better than staying. So, after she graduated, Catherine and I packed our suitcases and moved to Shanghai.
We had come planning to teach for a year, learn the language, and return to the United States conquering heroes with "international experience." A year later we were haggard from performing — educating feels too strong a word for what we did daily to adorable but inexhaustible Chinese schoolchildren. We were living on a steady diet of the world's best fried noodles and worst beer, rotting ourselves from the inside out. We barely spoke Mandarin and had no better prospects than when we had arrived, but we had fallen in love with the sprawling cosmopolitan metropolis we then called home.
Before our arrival I hadn't known what to expect. My childhood exposure to China consisted largely of "Big Bird Goes to China," visits to Chinese restaurants with my extended Jewish family, and an elementary school art teacher with a fondness for Chinese watercolors. It is from the signature on a piece that I did in her class, an inkon–paper towel study of monkeys clutching bananas, that I obtained my Mandarin name, De Li, or Righteous Power. I also recall my father's sustained amusement whenever he heard the name of Chairman Deng (pronounced "Dung") mentioned on early nineties National Public Radio.
Life in Shanghai was hectic, cramped, and crazy but indescribably vibrant. I assumed, as was common in those days, that China was a colorless authoritarian hell-scape — North Korea on a grander scale. What we found instead was an enchanting blend of colonial charm and aggressive Chinese futurism: quiet strolls down the leafy lanes of the former French Concession and neon-flooded rooftop parties a thousand feet in the sky.
That first day, driving into the city from remote Pudong Airport, I saw more high-rises than I had in my entire life up to that point. In the years that followed I watched the city build more than a dozen subway lines, host a World Expo, and bulldoze and replace entire neighborhoods more or less overnight. Every day was a blur of unfamiliar sights, smells, and tastes, a cacophony of new words and accents, a sensory shot to the cerebral cortex.
It was too much to process all at once. One year stretched into five. The opportunities came, as did the Mandarin, in fitful bursts. Catherine's gift for language landed her an unlikely gig hosting an Italian podcast at an internet start-up. I got into tourism, then public relations, and finally publishing. I started wearing shirts with buttons and collars, and then jackets and ties. We settled into the comfortable doldrums of long-term expatriate life in a country with gross pay disparities and a revolving door of trendy restaurants, cocktail bars, and massage parlors. The novelty wore off when we realized our existence in China had begun feeling predictable, boring even.
The country has a way of grinding people down. Over time the minor annoyances of life in a developing country — pollution, construction, congestion — built to a crescendo. The daily challenges that I once savored became tiresome. I grew nostalgic for home. The shortcomings of U.S. life faded from memory, and I began to miss the friends whose lives were drifting further and further from my orbit. Even if it meant giving up the relative comfort to which we had grown accustomed, it was time for a change. Leaving China would be bittersweet, but if we didn't leave after five years, we might never tear ourselves away.
When Catherine was accepted into the Foreign Service, it felt as if a prayer had been answered. Here was a life that would satisfy our wanderlust but keep us firmly tethered to home. We could have it both ways, or so I thought.
Three months after our repatriation, I was starting to understand the full gravity of being a diplomatic spouse. They could send us anywhere in the world. Anywhere.
I was already sweating through the armpits of my shirt when the first flag lit up the screen behind the podium. Young, smartly dressed professionals rose to polite applause as they collected their flags. Some people were luckier than others. You could see it in their eyes and smiles, genuine and forced. Whenever a desirable posting was crossed off of my list, the audience shed its genial preceremony camaraderie. The better the posting, the graver the ill-defined injury we wished on the recipient.
"San José, Costa Rica." We clapped merrily, willing him prolonged tropical illness.
"Rome, Italy." People choke on biscotti all the time.
"Oslo, Norway." I hope she freezes.
Our sympathies extended only to those unfortunate souls sent to the rougher corners of the globe, for their misfortune precluded ours. Every time the speaker announced a war zone, an unuttered sigh of relief swept the room, presumably minus one officer's family. A particularly dire Mexican border posting went to a small husk of a woman, who returned to her seat wiping tears from her eyes. "Poor thing," we said to ourselves. "Better her than us."
Finally, the screen turned fire engine red as a familiar flag appeared. "Chengdu, People's Republic of China," the speaker announced. And then he called Catherine's name. A month later we were headed to Sichuan.
The so-called Land of Plenty is roughly the same size as California, but home to more than eighty-seven million people. If it were a country, it would be the fourteenth most populous in the world. It is home to panda bears and holy mountains, but an unhurried pace is its chief asset. Sichuanese, to make the first of what will be many overgeneralizations, are outgoing and exceedingly warm folk with a well-deserved reputation for mellowness. They like their conversation lively and their food hot. "Szechwan" cuisine is famous the world over for bold flavors, particularly the numbingly spicy huajiao, or Sichuan peppercorn, which exists somewhere on the culinary spectrum between cumin and cocaine. They love nothing more than a discussion about philosophy or classical literature over a bubbling hot pot and a round of drinks.
Chengdu, Sichuan's capital, sits in a basin crisscrossed with slow-moving brackish rivers. It is a cloudy place in the best of times. Mountains on all sides form a natural barrier that traps in clouds of dust from the ceaseless construction, which mix with car exhaust and industrial pollution, coagulating into a white haze so dense it is sometimes difficult to see across the street. In Sichuan, it is said, dogs bark at the sun.
I had visited Chengdu years earlier. It was the first place I traveled after arriving in Shanghai. My friend Eric, a fellow midwesterner teacher, had started dating Johanna, the Chinese woman who recruited us to work for a shady-verging-on-criminal teaching outfit. Johanna invited a small group of us to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival with her family in Wutongqiao, just outside of Leshan, a small city in southern Sichuan that possesses the world's largest (seated) Buddha, carved from a cliff face where three rivers meet.
As our plane descended toward Chengdu, the cloud cover seemed endless. I could feel we were losing altitude, but still the mist enveloped us. I wondered how our pilot could see through it, how he would avoid slamming into the mountains, then thought better of such musings. Within seconds of the ground materializing we were on it.
Much of the trip was spent hiking Emei Mountain, a harrowingly steep site of Buddhist pilgrimage whose ascent involved countless narrow steps and fighting monkeys off with bamboo poles. You know, China shit.
A romantic quadrangle emerged when one of Johanna's old classmates, Jeremy, attempted to woo Johanna away from Eric, while Jeremy's girlfriend fought through sickness and humiliation to keep between Jeremy and Johanna. (I am happy to report that Eric and Johanna survived the test and are happily married with two adorable children. I cannot speak to Jeremy's fortunes.)
That first trip to Chengdu supplied a peaceful reprieve from the mountainside drama. It was an idyllic hamlet that felt stuck in an earlier, simpler time. I remember walking down streets beneath swaying canopies of leafy green trees, bicycles drifting past in no particular rush to get anywhere. In the parks and plazas, people sat around tables, drawing sips of tea and nibbling on pumpkin and sunflower seeds, accompanied by the clacking shuffle of mahjong tiles. I recall watching with bemused admiration as my companions ordered dumplings and emptied spoonful upon spoonful of molten hot pepper into the dipping vinegar. For them there was no such thing as too spicy.
I would often think about Chengdu in the years that followed. When Shanghai's pressure cooker dissolved my patience, I would wonder why I had not just moved to that lush oasis on the other side of the country.
As our plane turned its nose down toward the city years later, I was struck again by the endless sky. Outside the window was nothing but impenetrable grayness. Lower and lower, there was nothing but mist. The city waiting for us below — the city we would call home for two years — was not the Chengdu I remembered. There were sleek residential high-rises and luxury car dealerships. What materialized from the haze was a city in flux. It was becoming something else, though it was too early to say exactly what.
Half the city had been torn apart to make way for new superhighways and subway lines. Pipes and wires stuck out of gaping holes in streets and sidewalks, while an army of workers in blue coveralls rushed to staunch the wounds. It was difficult to get from one end of the city to the other in less than an hour, night or day — for all intents and purposes Chengdu was closed for renovation. Even the city's legendary street food had all but disappeared, sacrificed on the altar of Chinese modernity.
It was a city of fourteen million people, but it felt more like a way station than a settlement. Every other foreigner I met had either just arrived or would soon depart. People came here for all sorts of reasons, but the ground shifted too often to plant roots. But you don't move to Chengdu for life, you move for the lifestyle.
Whereas the Shanghainese always seemed aloof, too busy for conversation, a stranger in Chengdu was content to pour a cup of tea and consider any subject for an indefinite interval. In Shanghai we slaved behind desks late into the night. In Sichuan it could seem as if nobody was ever working, and by nine at night restaurants were already dimming their lights. Shanghai had been fashionable, a city of designer dresses and bespoke suits. In Chengdu someone was as likely to don a Buddhist's crimson robe as a silk tie. Even buried beneath tons of rubble and rebar, Chengdu had undeniable charm. Shanghai was a jungle of steel skyscrapers transposed atop a colonial spearhead, but Chengdu retained hints of old China's allure.
Our apartment overlooked a tranquil bend in the Jin River near the Bridge of Nine Eyes, so named because on a clear day its arches reflected in the water to form nine perfect ovals. Looking down from our twentieth-floor bedroom, we could see the magnificent Qing dynasty pagoda shooting up from the leafy bamboo of Wangjiang Park.
In Chengdu they did not use the titles "miss" or "mister," but instead "beautiful" and "handsome" (e.g., "How you doing, handsome?"). Instead of parting ways with the customary zai jian, "see you later," they always said, man zou, "Go slowly. Take it easy."
There was much about the city's transformation to frustrate and confound, but there was also a refreshing rawness. Call it demolition or reinvention. Whatever it was, it was a departure from the China I thought I knew. It challenged every preconception I held about my adopted country, a process that began with baijiu.
I met Johan my first week in Sichuan. One of Catherine's new colleagues, an energetic and gregarious young diplomat I'll call Tony, invited us to a Halloween party at an Irish pub. The bar itself was unremarkable, the type of third-rate, smoke-filled watering hole you can find in any remote East Asian city. The beer was bad and the cover band worse, but I repeat myself.
Tony, who was wearing the vest and helmet of a Chinese construction worker, leaned in so I could hear him over the music. "There's someone I want you to meet," he said, gesturing toward a tall, lanky man in horn-rimmed glasses, with shaggy hair, frilly white shirt, and plaid trousers. "This is Johan," Tony shouted over a tortured rendition of "Hotel California," or some such garbage. "He runs a baijiu factory."
"Baijiu?" I said, not sure I had heard correctly. "Do you have a card?"
He produced a business card emblazoned in gold with the Mars zodiac symbol and a name: Austin Danger Powers. It was Halloween, he had spared no detail on his costume, and the pop cultural reference was presumably still fresh in Sweden.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Drunk in China"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Derek Sandhaus.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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