THAT TIME I KISSED MY TOILET

I never ever wanted to go to China. I was the little girl from a poor family. We did without things many western families wouldn’t know how to live without. The phone was cut off, the car towed away, food was scarce. My mother saw to one exception - despite the electric bill company collectors constantly spitting out threats, she never allowed our heat supply to be cut off. She grew up even poorer than us in an ancient home with parents who didn't believe in wasting money on a foolish thing like heat. There was no way to get warm for the 1st half of her life and, once on her own, she was, in true Scarlet O'Hara fashion, never going to be cold again. I would often come home to find her sitting in front of the open oven with a blanket covering both her and the 500 degree appliance, trapping in the heat. I am my mother’s daughter and have the same cold blood running through my veins so I would often pull up a seat and join her. We would stay there until we were… cooked. I too determined to always be warm. Though reality deprived me of many things it never succeeded in taking my dreams. My dreams were always very real, very vibrant. They let me live different lives. They gave my my ticket to travel. They took me first to South America, to the Galapagos Islands and Machu Picchu, then dog-sledding across Antarctica. I saw the Taj Mahal of India and felt the beat of Cuba. Finally my dreams landed me on Zanzibar, Tanzania where I fell in love with the land, the people, the very essence of the place. I traveled the world on my pillow. The whole world, except for China. Now here I was 28 years old and still without the experience of a single overseas trip. I had not been to Mexico. I had barely been over my prairie province border into the mythical America. Until one day I was given the opportunity to break onto the world travel scene. I was to learn some of the language I had been avoiding learning for the past three years, learn about other cultures and learn self-value through accomplishment. I was going to China. And I wasn't even excited. It sounded more like a begrudged, though very well intended, assignment rather than an opportunity. I settled on the more appreciative term - adventure. Yes, definitely, it would be an adventure. Certainly not my first lesson in Chinese culture, but possibly the most telling, was my trip to the Chinese visa application office. Turning the Vancouver city corner, a city well known for the healthy lifestyle it promotes, the wafts of cigarette smoke came on sudden and strong. I knew I was close. The room was packed - one reeling Caucasian businessman and 200 loud black-haired people who all seemed to have the notion their very life depended on their being first in line. I was going to hate China. Still half-drugged with motion sickness pills, I deplaned and took my 1st steps on foreign soil. It didn't feel any different. I was a bit apprehensive about finding my way, via Chinese signs, going through customs without being interrogated or arrested and picking, out of a crowd of thousands of people, my Chinese contact whom I had never before laid eyes on. To find which luggage carousel matched my flight number, I had the brilliant idea of following a large crowd of Chinese people who would surely know where they were going. The corridor we passed through soon opened to show 100 baggage carousels, each with 300 Chinese people standing around them.  Which 300 had been on my plane, I had no idea. This was a mistake I would make more than once in the first few days. I kept on forgetting I was, after all, in China. Despite myself, all went well at the airport. The drive between Pudong and my destination sleeping quarters in the outreaches of old Shanghai however did not go well by any western standard. I myself am admittedly not the mildest of drivers. While not being obnoxious, I am not exactly known for my patience. I refer to my kind as weavers. Weaving between traffic lanes, behind, beside, and then in front of other vehicles – I see no problem with it.  But this was more like weaving a web of certain death, racing and cutting off your mourners on the way to your own funeral.  Forget road rage, whilst in China, think Sidewalk Rage. I am absolutely certain the Chinese as a nation are superhuman in their ability to estimate distance. There was rarely a car traveling at speeds of less than 100 km an hour that was any further away from the next car than one (less-than-generous) centimeter. And yet, there remain alive over 1.3 billion of them. That is no small feat. 

The sound of honking horns became as a single two-hour-long note. The signs that looked like pictures, not words, and the buildings, all ungodly colors of neglect, became a hallucination that surely I would wake from the next day…     

The next day came. I knew because I could make out shapes. I maybe got out of bed twice.  

Where were my dreams? They had never left me this alone before, this trapped in the here-and-now.

Day two I remembered my mission. I walked out the front door.  

I walked out the front door and I became Angelina Jolie. This was an area that did not see foreigners. Ever. It was the 2nd last stop along the Shanghai subway route. If I walked into a store, every worker would stop dead in their tracks, stare, call up all the other workers from the back and point, talk about me and follow at my heels like the most devoted Golden Retriever you’ve ever seen. I had been on a 20 hour flight, not showered in three days, had not a stitch of makeup on, and I was a Supermodel. And I was enjoying it. If only I had let my natural blonde hair grow out… 

It did not take long until I hated seeing other waiguoren (foreigners). China was mine. Go away. Go get your own country.      This euphoric walking-on-water stage lasted approximately 6 hours. (I was to stay 6 weeks…) It lasted until I walked back to my week-long headquarters and opened my eyes to what I was sleeping on and in. The bed was not, but rather a wooden plank board held a foot off the concrete floor by a metal stand.  The blankets seemed made of woven pubic hairs stained with semen, vomit, blood, salmonella….   all of the above and then some. And yet, this non-bed was one of the most welcome sights I had yet seen in China. I could not wait, each night, to crawl underneath the whisper of warmth awaiting me in that horrible moving living thing my host called a blanket. For seven nights I rushed to it, pulled it’s extremities over the top of my head and imagined myself warm. 

It was late December. I had brought in my backpack over a month’s worth of clothing.  I wore every single solitary piece I had – every   single   day.  I looked like the Michelin Man. I am of slight build but I was able to appear triple my size with, stuffing, as it were.  But it was nowhere near enough to ever be, let alone stay, warm. In actuality, it was not that cold out. Above freezing. Perhaps 6 degrees Celsius.  In the western world that would mean put on a coat and go enjoy the crisp air.  In China, that means your body temperature is 6 degrees and you are therefore very near death.  You don’t get warm in Chinese winters.  There are no stores but rather storefronts.  Fronts open to outside air. There are no heaters on public transport, in restaurants, in theaters, in homes.. or at least not the home I was staying in. And no hot water. And so, if a layer of pubic hair, blood and vomit were going to offer a reprieve from the cold – I would welcome it with open arms.

After a few nights of non-sleeping on the non-bed, I set out to get myself a much needed massage.  It turned out to be a $9.33 CND hour long piece of paradise. I went into it thinking my masseuse was way too young to have any strength or skill in her hands.  I came out of it knowing she would be the 2nd best thing to ever happen to my body. That young Chinese woman was the 2nd be all, end all of my tactual life. The woman filling the moments (45 minutes worth of moments) prior to her however didn’t exactly produce the same pleasurable sensations - at least not for me. Entry to this particular health club came with complimentary sauna usage.  In the Western spa-like settings I was used to, women are most often partially covered with a towel-type wrap.  Sometimes they go without altogether.  That’s okay.  The female body is, at least sometimes, a beautiful thing.  We Westerners accept that fact and if we choose to, we simply sit back to allow others to enjoy our bared beauty.  But sitting in that small sauna, covered with a towel, I was made mute, not because my (decidedly naked) companion and the lady standing very close and straight in front of me were speaking in a language I was still struggling to understand, but because the lady in question was - not still.  My shock was such that I get wide-eyed to this day thinking about her.  She brought with her into the sauna a disposable packet of thick green slime, opened it with haste and then rubbed it all over the peculiarly female parts of her body for a full 45 minutes… all the while having a very typical day to day Chinese shoot-the-breeze and never standing more than one foot away from me.  I felt like a 12 year old girl again; embarrassed to the point of devastation.  I learned that day that very different cultural ideals exist for the sexuality of men and women.  Many Chinese women do not shave - anything.  But they spend precious hours rubbing their bodies with green goodies.  And no doubt their husbands appreciate it.  And I respect that they put in the effort for their husbands.  I might ask that they do it in the privacy of their own bathrooms but then again their bathrooms don’t have hot water and they would probably prefer it if I didn’t bring my pale hair-free body into their public saunas.  I get it.  I’m okay with that too.

China is cheap.  The price for the massage-of-a-lifetime was actually extremely high by Chinese standards.  Average price for an hour massage was 25 Yuen.  Today that translates into $3.65 USD.  You remain fully clothed (a blessing due to the ice cold air and less than clean sheets you lay on), you face the floor and watch unnamed species of insects crawl through your line of vision and you’re surrounded by a group of women chattering and bickering and knitting all the while.  You do not go for the ambiance; you go to have a 90 lb girl pummel you back to health.  They are good at what they do – massaging, chattering, bickering and knitting.  Everywhere I went in China, every immeasurable city and lost village, on the sidewalks, in the restaurants, the shopping malls, the bus stops… women were knitting. They had a system.  It worked for them.  They carried small stools so that on a second’s notice, they could plop down and knit.  If I was Chinese, I’d learn how to knit too.  I would knit myself a sleeping bag with legs – ever chasing the elusive winds of warmth.

China is cheap, yes, unless you’re a foreigner.  To their abysmal dismay, I know a Chinese word here and there and that, when coupled with a working knowledge of body language and facial expression, leads inevitably to recognition of someone trying to rip you off.  They don’t think of it this way. They matter-of-factly believe there are Chinese Prices and there are Foreigner Prices. Of course they should pay different prices – they are different people! Even the foreigners who’ve been there for some time are so accustomed to it – they just accept it.  Whaoh, hold up!  Not me!  Don’t try and rip ME off!  I exited my mother’s womb with a highly developed sense of justice and fairness.  This sick sense of mine reared its head each and every transaction I made in my month in The People’s Republic of China. The Chinese People’s Republic, not the Canadian or American or European or Indian People’s Republic..  those people just finance it.  I clearly remember waiting on the bus before it left Beijing for the Great Wall.  A woman came on and walked up and down the isles calling out “shui – liang ge yuen, shui – liang ge yuen” (water – $2Y) until she spotted me, pointed and said straight to my face “shui – SAN ge yuen!” (water - $3Y).  I got my water.  For $2Y. I paid the price though…. I once again was thrust into a country of 1.3 billion paparazzi and I the easy celebrity target.  One particular young Chinese man, armed with a camera phone and sitting across from me tried the hour and a half long trip back from BaDaLing to snap his million yuen picture of my face.  I kept it covered with my hair, my scarf, my hood.  But the instant I took it down enough to see as I got up to leave - he got his money shot. I walked utterly defeated, resigned to stares and stalkers, back to my hotel hideout.  

The Great Wall was… almost great.  I can see how some, romanced by history, could feel it is great. How a history of oppression and fear and war and death and slavery resulting in such a massive accomplishment could inspire some.  It IS massive. The Wall is set out before you, not in a straight line for ease of viewing as a rainbow, but rather on all sides of you.  China’s Great Wall does not suddenly appear with cymbals crashing and angels singing.  It really is more like the creeping long tailed dragon that you, acceptingly, become aware of at your side, both sides and then all around you. What the photos don’t show you are the modern neon advertisements and hordes of merchants lining every step.  As in everywhere in China (and I should have expected no difference here) you are accosted at every turn with a loud, harsh, “HELLO!!”  This is not a greeting.  It is a demand.  In the case of men not selling anything… it is a demand for I’m not sure what.  But mostly, they are selling – anything and everything from jade (plastic) Buddhas and hand weaved (mass-produced in a factory) shawls to leopard pelts (dyed German Shepherd skins). You literally have to step over hundreds of people trying to seduce you away from your money.  At times they chase you, loudly (everything is loud, all the time, everywhere), until you are forced to be ruder than you ever thought you would be or you throw up your arms in surrender and hand over the filthy RMB in exchange for some cheap, lead laden trinket you’d just as soon leave in your hotel room than bother to pack home.  Two other prolific Chinese problems which The Almost Great Wall fails to escape are - the cold (I ran to the top, took a picture and ran back to the unheated, but at least out of the icy wind, bus.) and the pollution.  Photographs can be masters of deception.  I recently saw a book of China in Pictures.  On the cover stood The Greatness shrouded, it would seem, in the dusky setting of a pale China sun.  Not so.  It’s called air pollution.  Air pollution so thick you cannot see the ground when looking out the top floor windows of some Beijing high rises.  Romantic?  Yes, when you’re standing in a clean North American bookstore with a latte in your hand looking at professional glossies.  When you’re actually standing on the freezing, polluted, over-crowded pathway that makes up China’s most famous tourist trap? No.

I had planned on making several other tourist trap excursions. I wanted to see the pandas at WooLong Nature Preserve in Sichuan Province and the tigers in the far north-easterly province of Harbin.  When I asked around about the tigers I met a couple who had just come from there and told me the tour consists of Chinese tourists buying either chickens, goats or whole cows for exorbitant prices and letting them lose to watch the emancipated tigers rip them apart.  I decided to pass.  I did have the unfortunate experience of being drawn into a zoo in Kunming, in hopes of making up for the tigers and pandas I had forgone seeing elsewhere.  I felt sick to my stomach for having given a cent (or even a hundredth of a yuen which is worth about 0.0015 USD) to a facility which thought it could rightfully, on any moral level, call itself a zoo.  It seemed more of a despicable play on the word.  I got about a third of the way through the cages before literally running out and as far away as I could so as to avoid either being publicly sick or lashing out at the workers for the atrocities being done to those animals. Chained, starved, lying in their own feces and on the verge of death. 

It got me thinking about the ratio of care..  human to animal. 

The 1st time I saw it, I did not trust my own eyes.  It had been a long, cold, hard night.  Surely my eyes, my mind, were playing tricks on me.  Surely that man could not be doing what I thought he was.  He could not be holding his beautiful young daughter out to the street with her bottoms off to use it as a public privy.  I passed by and continued on my way for some “xiao chi” (small eats).  On the way back, along the same narrow packed street, my newly acquired munchies lost all appeal.  There was the proof.  The more I looked, the more I did not want to see.  Walking under buildings, you dare not look up to see what warm half-liquids are being dumped down onto your coat. Needless to say, that coat did not make the flight home with me. 

Even in the most remote place of any I can imagine that exists in China, as if in a page out of a National Geographic magazine, a place where the local people have never seen a village outside their own, to my utter dismay, I found myself surrounded by cigarette butts and filth. My native tour guide of the day told me to be thankful I was visiting in the dead of winter.  He said in the summer I would not be able to handle the stench of the place. I saw the people staying warm by consuming huge amounts of hot peppers that burn you from the inside out.  I saw rice only once.  Mostly there were corn and peppers and lots and lots of noodles.  

Ah, noodles!  The smell of noodles very quickly became my craving and saving grace.  My train-ride from Guilin to Kunming almost did me in.  I don’t recall how long it was, only that I believed I may never see the light of another enjoyable day for as long as I lived.  It was at least 22 hours.  The cost difference between a regular chair and a sleeper was minimal – probably in the ballpark of $9- vs. $12- but there was no way I was about to fall asleep and have everything in my possession stolen (which I was convinced it would have been) and so I entered right along with the poorest Chinese passengers and took my seat.  My assigned seat was directly under the “No Smoking” sign but when the train conductor entered and took his pew standing directly in front of me, leaning against the no smoking sign, and proceeded to light up and then offer his lighter to all the passengers around me, I knew I was done for.  The smoke was so thick in that car; I am convinced that one night took a year off my life.  When I could not handle it anymore I waived down the conductor and, without knowing how to say the needed words, tried to explain to him why I needed to move.  In response (I’m still not sure if it was in response to my request as some kind of sick joke or merely his attempt at deciphering my poor language skills) he offered me a cigarette.  I closed my eyes and tried to stifle my hatred of the country before I took it out on him and got thrown off the train.  I really tried, but when the man on my left who happened to be large enough to spill over his seat, taking up half of mine, got so loud in his jokes I had to plug my ears and the man on my right, nearly toothless, laughed at Lefty’s jokes inches from my face and I literally choked on the breath of a man who put 30 cigarettes in his mouth daily but never a toothbrush, and I no longer had enough hands to cover my mouth, my nose and my ears – I had enough!  And then… there it was!  The smell of noodles!  It broke through the putridness around me and gave me a renewed sense of inner strength.  From that moment on, every time someone walked past, to the front of the car where the hot water spigot was, with a little package of instant noodles in their hands – I closed my eyes and prayed, “Dear Lord, thank-you this day for the smell of noodles, give everyone on this train Lord, an appetite to eat multiple packages of noodles…”   

The beggars of China mostly made me very angry.  From familial ties, I am well aware of pretenders setting out to make a free buck by taking advantage of all whom they can.  Sometimes the beggars would latch onto my clothing and pull and yell demands that I give them something.  The most persistent ones would not let go of their death grip of my arm nor stop their yelling for a couple blocks.  This was the best way, in my opinion, to get slapped, not to appeal to the mercies of foreigners.  But despite how I may sound, I am not cold hearted when I perceive a sincere need.  There were numerous times I wished to give people money who asked for nothing.  Foremost in my mind was a thin young man who circled me a few times, watching closely each mouthful I took from the street side food vendor.  And then, in one fell swoop, he walked over, took all the food off my plate with his bare hands and walked away. The woman vendor saw this and yelled after him, not wanting her eatery to get a bad name with foreigners. But in a way, I was glad to have contributed towards a meal for the young man… I yearned to turn back time 5 minutes, see his hunger, and offer to buy him a meal of his own.              

Sadness for the people can spring up everywhere you look in China.  Their clothing, or lack of it, alone is enough to bring a person to tears.  I remember a man riding his bike in the frigid pouring rain on a mountain top in Guilin - naked.  I remember the man driving down a highway on a dirt bike wearing a grey business suit, no socks, fluffy fluorescent green slippers.  I remember riding the metro one day and thinking, standing in front of me was quite possibly one of the best dressed and most hygienic men I had observed in China. …but I could not keep my incredulous eyes from following the lines of his body from his shoes to his pants to his shirt up his face to his hair and then back down the length of his arms… and there lay his betrayal. Fingernails, stained black and longer than I’ve ever been able to grow my own. 

China is a devastated country - Godless and ruined in an almost complete sense. It will try to lure you in with ridiculously misleading proclamations of its own greatness.  It will then take you and dominate and control you, as it does its own people, making them utterly powerless, totally insignificant, and fading into an endless cycle of chasing the Western shadow of a life they can never hope to attain in their Eastern prison. As I sat beside the smoky train window, passing squalor and sewage and some of the country’s tourism sights I was supposed to want to see, I held my iPhone on my lap and watched the Planet Earth series “Planet in Peril”.  Words fail me in describing the deep sorrow I felt for our home planet.  In no other place could the point have been more poignantly made. 

My time in China thrust me into a world of conversations.  Of ‘yes, I’ve traveled’, of ‘yes, I’ve been to where that movie scene was shot’ and, more significantly, I’ve been at the Chinese ground zeros of BBC world news.  I can understand what it would be like to sleep on the sidewalks of Chinese cities after an earthquake, to suffer a cold spell and never feel warm or have a place to take care of personal business without a thousand eyes on you - a requirement towards feeling human.  I can look at things through eyes that have seen and can listen not only sympathetically but knowingly.  And I know just how Thank-GOD-full we should be that we were not born in China.   

I returned home. I breathed a heavy heart-felt "God Bless America" and I kissed my toilet. And, then, very soon thereafter, I began dreaming of China..........

I write this in a hotel room on the Southern California Coast, sitting in a warm comfortable bed; Satellite television on mute in front of me for company.  I write using the hotel letter writing pad and ironically, but not surprisingly, a copy of “The Teachings of Buddha”, which I found in the bed-side drawer, to support the strokes of my pen.