The Long, Silly Road to Hangzhou: Faulty Memory China, Part One
In which our narrator makes a slow-motion rash decision to drag his dog across the world.
I was in northern Scotland, so the day was dull and rainy. A thick grey mist had settled over the loch outside the small town of Torridon, where the majestic Torridon Hotel stands in glorious isolation. From the edge of the water looking back, the reddish bricks of the hotel’s tower could just barely be seen. A fog rolled in, blanketing the fields with more banks of fog. I’d be staring at the loch, at the misty hills, at this chilly, wet paradise, organizing my thoughts, but it became difficult to see much. Across the gloom, the orange lights of the hotel were coming on, little beacons promising warmth. I trudged back across the field; I had a mistake to make.
I finally accepted the offer to work for Alibaba—and, therefore, to move to China—in the fall of 2016, while in Torridon. I was working on a travel story about the North Coast 500, a spectacular driving route along the empty, barren, and gorgeous northern shoreline of Scotland. I’d been on the road for a few days, slowly working my way along the narrow, winding roads. The North Coast 500 and had been without stable internet for most of the time, but that was fine. I had been delayed a response to Alibaba for months, hoping something better would come along. It didn’t.
Standing in a corner of my hotel room, hungry and tired, I pressed my laptop against the wall in hopes that the Wi-Fi would penetrate the building’s ancient stone walls for just long enough to hit send on the email. By this point, I’d been through five rounds of negotiations with the company’s HR representative, a woman named Fountain. Fountain was a skilled negotiator and had a unique communication style: she spent 100% of our conversations screaming at full volume into the phone. Whether this technique was designed to overcome weak cell signals or to disguise her faltering English, I never learned.
“Could we discuss the salary, Fountain?” I had asked for the fifth time. “I don’t think that’s enough for a person with my experience.”
“NO!! THIS IS THE SALARY THAT EVERYONE GETS AT THIS LEVEL,” she shouted back.
“Okay, then what about flights to my home country a few times a year?”
“NO! ABSOLUTEY NO. NO ONE GET THIS. NO. NO. NO!” she countered.
“Really? What about a housing allowance? I’m moving there from overseas for this job—”
“NO HOUSING ALLOWANCE! NO ONE HAVE!”
Eventually, we landed on a clever compromise: I would stop asking for things, and Alibaba would give me exactly the contract they had offered in the first place. Well played, Fountain, I thought.
I read through those terms one last time—jotted down on hotel stationary, as Fountain, well-school in Alibaba’s HR intricacies, left no email trail of the offer. Everything was done by phone, a practice that continued after I joined the company. I checked the scratched notes and read over my email, took a deep and foolish breath, and hit send.
Then I did the only reasonable thing I could think of: I went downstairs to explore the hotel’s remarkable whisky collection, stared at the fog licking at the windowpanes, sipped from a dram of a rare and perfect Caol Ila, and wondered what exactly I was getting myself into.
Getting hired by Alibaba had been remarkably straightforward up to that point.
I’d had a quick chat with the hiring manager for all content-related jobs, passed a simple writing test, had an hour-long Skype chat with the director for Alibaba’s User Experience Design team, and was told they’d be happy to offer me the role.
I didn’t really want the job. Applying had been an experiment, the result of a whimsical what-if conversation with my then-wife—a reporter on human rights and refugees—who had asked one evening, “Do you think you could get a job in China?” I laughed. China! Why would we want to live in China?! We were happily ensconced in the expat1 bubble in Istanbul, living in a leaky but beautiful old flat beside a park where my Turkish street mutt Toby could terrorize the local stray cats and poop in inappropriate places. We ate from Turkey’s infinite supply of cheese and drank its abundant, cheap, and pretty bad wine. We were writing and I was consulting and financially comfortable. But my ex had a taste for ill-advised reporting in dangerous places, and a financial dependency on my corporate work to fund foreign reporting trips (newspapers and magazines at the time being shy to fork out travel costs on a 10,000-word think piece on Uighur rights in Xinjiang).
With only half an eye on the future and maybe a passing flirtation with the idea of a steady job in a strange country, I applied to the first job I saw listed in China—Lead Content Strategist with Alibaba in Shanghai, working for the company’s financial division, Alipay—and had an interview within a week. “Okay, okay,” we’d laughed, let’s keep this joke going. I was shifted to apply for a different role in Hangzhou (a city I had never heard of) because I couldn’t speak Chinese, but had an offer within a couple of weeks. More laughing. “Why not keep cards on the table?” we said. “It’s fine. It won’t hurt to have a backup plan. Why not try to get the Chinese visa?” Then I had the contract offer. It was clear that the whole thing would take months and months, and in the meantime a better offer would surely come along.
Months and months did pass, with Alibaba’s outsourced visa company very, very slowly stepping me through the process of getting the work permit materials ready. I’d need a health check: they told me to go to a hospital in Istanbul that no longer existed. I needed to get electronic fingerprint data collected: they sent me to a visa office that had never offered the service. I needed to legalize a marriage certificate—none of the notaries they suggested for me in Turkey would do this. Each new requirement provided a dozen pieces of misinformation and more comforting delays. The sheer incompetence of the visa company, the shouting from Fountain, the ineptitude of the whole endeavour threw up red flag after red flag. Surely, I would never actually work for this company.
Then, Turkey exploded. The nationalism and paranoia stoked by its lunatic president Recep Tayyip Erdogan bubbled over with a failed (or staged) coup attempt, and everyone who opposed the government became a target. Suddenly, our long-term residency permits and status as foreign journalists put us in a far less stable position. Enemies of the Turkish Republic were being jailed across the country, from academics and lawmakers to elected officials and journalists. A New York Times reporter was arrested in eastern Turkey and held for weeks in solitary confinement, with no access to lawyers. People were disappearing. Our other expat2 friends began to think better of their extended stays in Istanbul and started easing themselves into other jobs in safer cities across Europe. Far worse, our outspoken Turkish and Kurdish friends lived either in constant fear of persecution or in a state of perpetual depression and despair.
At the same time, the steady stream of work I’d been getting as a consultant for government websites began to dry up. There’s a natural ebb and flow to consulting work anyway, but this was a particularly long ebb and my best guess was that it would be at least a year without a new contract, a dry spell that would eat through most of my savings.
Then my Chinese visa was ready, and life’s funnelling effect—or at least its propensity to cascade troubles—made Hangzhou and Alibaba the most attractive option. Solid income, adventure, and hey what the hell maybe I’d learn something? Sure. China it was!
After months of constant foot-dragging, things began moving very quickly. The apartment was packed up. The dog was repeatedly vaccinated and granted a pet passport. A farewell tour of Istanbul was organized, then drunkenly enacted. There was a plan: my wife would return to Canada for summer weddings and to get her Chinese visa sorted (foreshadowing!), and the dog and I would blaze the trail in China.
And so, one June evening in 2017, Toby and I boarded a KLM flight to Amsterdam and then on to Hangzhou, the place Marco Polo famously said was the finest city he had ever seen.
The plane touched down in a cloud of yellow-brown haze, the sun an obscure blot somewhere overhead. In wasn’t raining, yet everything looked wet and heavy. No airport in the world has ever provided a good introduction to its city, but the scene here was particularly grim: the ground staff were beleaguered and bent at strange angles as they ran shouting toward the taxiing plane. Row upon row of aircraft from Chinese airlines I’d never heard of were scattered at odd intervals across the tarmac, all looking dirty, disused, and forlorn. But the sky—that greyish-yellow goop—was the grimmest sight of all. What was this weather? This was supposed to be a clear summer’s day.
The Chinese have an idiom for everything, and so unsurprisingly there’s a popular saying about the beauty of Hangzhou. “Above the sky, there is heaven; beneath, there is Hangzhou and Suzhou.” Hangzhou was doing its best to refute this: I couldn’t tell where the sky ended and where this heaven on earth began. I couldn’t even tell what was sky, but I soon tasted it. As the gate was attached to the plane and the door opened, Hangzhou’s vile air gushed in, reeking of dust and gasoline.
I hadn’t known exactly what to expect from Hangzhou, but I certainly wasn’t coming in to this experience blind. I had done my best to foster enthusiasm for the city. In those nine months between contract offer and visa approval, I’d looked at every available English resource about Hangzhou. This is an admittedly short reading list, but the Internet had reassured me that Hangzhou was one of China’s greenest cities, not in the sense that it was unpolluted, but in the sense that it had green hills throughout, and canals and waterways, and tea terraces and bamboo forests, and pagodas and vast temple complexes. It looked serene, the sort of place the old Chinese poets would contemplate the moon rising over the lily ponds and, stroking their wispy moustaches, would pen beautiful couplets about the eternal beauty of nature and human fragility. That was the Hangzhou I was eager to see, not this slum of an airport in the ass end of a half-built suburb. “To the apartment!” I bravely thought to myself. “Let’s start this adventure!”
I asked one of the friendly KLM flight crew where I could get the dog once I had cleared the border. “I’m sorry, I have no idea. No one has ever brought a dog on this route. Probably the luggage carousel?” was the reply. An inauspicious start.
After an hour of queueing for immigration in the sticky, un-air-conditioned arrivals hall, I found the dog, his enormous crate sitting beside one of the baggage areas, and loaded him and my two giant suitcases onto two luggage carts. Toby, excited to see me and wailing after almost 24 hours in transit, promptly rocked his crate off the cart. As it slid along the tile floor, the other passengers screamed and ran. One of the KLM staff helped me load him back on the cart, and we repeated this ballet several times while waiting for customs, always with the good Samaritans of Hangzhou awkwardly scattering out of the way.
There’s no real concept of lines in Chinese airports. The mass of people pushing to be first to the on-arrivals luggage scanner moved slowly. (All bags are scanned multiple times at Chinese airports and train stations, both at departure and upon arrival.) As yet unaware of the appropriate etiquette for these circumstances, I waited patiently toward the rear of the blob as other arrivals cut in front of me. My pardon mes and excuse mes went unheard. There was still no sign of the serenity promised by the tourism bureaus. No, Hangzhou was a stinky, bewildering blur of elbows and shoulders, broken air conditioning, and a whimpering dog.
“You’re going to have to push ahead of these assholes or you’ll be here all fucking month,” said a voice behind me. “What’s your dog called? Here, let me help you.”
At last, something passing for a friendly face. This was John, a stocky American. He held one end of Toby’s crate and looked around with visible disgust. “God, I fucking hate this place,” he said. “First time?”
I laughed, which seemed the only appropriate response. I was too new here to agree with him yet. “First time, yeah,” I agreed.
“You here for work?” he asked.
I explained the situation briefly while following John’s instructions and pushing ahead.
“Good luck,” he said when I told him I worked for Alibaba. I could tell he didn’t mean it.
“I work for them too. I’m Jack’s pilot. But they let me live in Hong Kong and I fly up whenever he needs to go somewhere. I would never live here. He has a few of us.” Pilots, he meant, not grumpy Americans, though time would prove he had more than a few of those too. “Push ahead of that lady, man—she’s not going to let you go first.”
John kept me company in the crowd. I’d later come to meet many of his type in China: vaguely friendly and loosely well-meaning, worn down by years of struggling with what they perceive as China’s inconveniences. They were all covered in the same crusty layer of cynicism and sarcasm and cussing. A perfectly sound companion for 25 minutes in a customs queue, but not the first guy you’d call on a Friday night for a beer. These men—and they are always men—become hardened by their chosen circumstances, and wear perseverance as a badge of honour, as though manfully struggling in perpetuity were a kind of merit. Maybe it is. They are sometimes very helpful, understanding of the difficulties of living in a place like this without a grasp of the language. They know the people who know the people who know the grey areas of Chinese society, they can find you a crooked accountant or a drug dealer or a place to buy cheese. They often marry Chinese women and raise families here, but always position themselves on the outer fringes of Chinese society, from where they can comfortably criticize both their home country and their adopted country, grumbling at both, happy in neither.
Time passed more quickly in John’s company, though. Before long, we were through the luggage scanner and he deposited me at the animal quarantine station, where to his immense credit offered to wait for an hour while I filled out paperwork and politely bullied my dog into China.
I hadn’t been able to find any information on whether Hangzhou’s airport had a mandatory quarantine for live animals like Shanghai (one week) or Beijing (one month). I’d decided long in advance that I’d smile and nod my way through the process, under no circumstances handing over my dog to customs officials at a backwater airport. The customs officer looked like a teenager, his faded olive uniform too big for him, and he was clearly uncomfortable to be dealing with me. He spoke no English (no fault of his) and I spoke no Chinese (a fault of mine). My phone didn’t work, so translation apps were out of the question and we dealt in gestures. I handed over the immigration paperwork, all the details I had with me, and gave a thumbs up. The officer fussed over an ancient all-in-one printer to try to make a copy of everything, shrugging to indicate “technology huh?” I laughed, an over-the-top pantomime laugh to say “I know, technology is so stupid.” He laughed. We were bonded. Then the awkward moment arrived. The officer gestured to the crate with the panting, manic dog to say, “That’s fine, just leave it here.” I thank him in English and grabbed the handle and started wheeling away. He froze, said something in Chinese. We were shifting to the spoken word, which spelled trouble. I said the only Chinese words I knew: “Xie xie.” Thank you. As in, thank you, we’ll be going. His tone changed slightly; he said something else in Chinese. “Yes, thank you,” I said in English. I smiled. I xie xie’d a bit more, all the while inching out of the office with the cart. I waved. He spoke more loudly. I waved. I left. I passed through the glass sliding doors. I didn’t look back.
“Do you want to get a beer tomorrow?” asked John as we entered a mass of taxi drivers scattering at the sight of the dog. I took his business card, thanked him, and told him I’d send him an email. He rolled his eyes at the thought of email in China. “Good luck,” he offered again. We shook hands and he wandered off to find the driver that the company had provided him, but not me (well played, Fountain). I never saw John again.
I wheeled my luggage cart to some kind of grass-covered median and freed Toby, who promptly went insane. He smothered me, leaping and licking in his manic way, standing up on his hind legs and putting his paws on my shoulders so he could lick my face. I fed him, and he ate eagerly. He did his doggy things, scratching and rolling in the wilted grass and peeing on a bush to the disgusted looks of every single person around.
Meanwhile, something in me shifted, and I was filled simultaneously with tremendous exhaustion and dull excitement. The ordeal of travelling here was over, and I was free to begin the ordeal of living here. I was in China.
Hangzhou is an immense place. It’s considered a Tier 2 city in China, which means it isn’t one of the few megapolises of over 25 million people, like Shanghai, Beijing, or Guangzhou, that are consider Tier 1 cities. China has over 100 cities with more than one million inhabitants. Hangzhou has anywhere between 8 million and 10 million people. It’s hard to say officially, as Chinese citizens are counted based on where their residence permit—called a hukou—is issued. The hukou gives them access to education and healthcare in their registered region, and the ability to own property, which makes certain Tier 1 hukous highly sought after. This means that when someone from a Tier 1 city moves to a Tier 2 city, they don’t easily give up their hukou for Beijing or Shanghai or Guangzhou, since that’s the city in which they want to own apartments and raise their family. Practically speaking, these people don’t “live” in the city they actually live in; they aren’t counted as residents. So: Hangzhou has 8-10 million hukou holders, who could live anywhere. Maybe in Hangzhou. Maybe not.
I certainly didn’t see anyone. China is meant to be crowded. It’s the most populous place on earth, with a supposed 1.6 billion people. Where were they? On the 45-minute drive from the airport to my AirBNB in Hangzhou’s Binjiang district, I counted only a dozen or so people on the sidewalks. There were a few cars, but it wasn’t busy. It wasn’t pulsating. It did not teem. It seemed deserted.
Not that it wasn’t massively built up. Everywhere, 40-story apartment blocks, dense hives of ugly grey-brown skyscrapers were going up, partly camouflaged against the yellow-grey sky. Through that ungodly thick haze, more and more apartment towers revealed themselves, empty and quivering against the pathetic sun.
The distance from the airport to the district I was staying in represents maybe one-fifth of Hangzhou, maybe even less. The city has a dozen main districts spreading out from the old centre around the West Lake in all directions until they meet some natural obstacle (the river, another lake, a mountain) or a man-made obstacle (tea plantations, an expressway, another city). Each district has thousands and thousands of these horrible high-rise apartments, tall and terrible and empty, built for a population that never came. To drive across Hangzhou would take the better part of two hours, all of it ugly, just uninterrupted expanses of rampant development and very few busy places.
Eventually, my taxi got off the highway on Binsheng Road, where I would live for the next two years. Sickly trees lined the street, but they were trees all the same and forced a kind of quaintness on the neighbourhood. In my exhaustion, I mistakenly thought it looked like Taipei with its tidy shopfronts and the drooping branches. The buildings here seemed older than the rest of the city, the density lower. There were cute-looking clothing boutiques promising Korean Trendy Styles and small restaurants with a few customers. This was more like it, I thought. It was quiet, but there was a faint heartbeat.
“Here,” demanded the taxi driver, stopping at the gate of the compound where my AirBNB was. He’d spent the trip panicking about dog hair and screaming every time Toby shifted in his seat. He got out his cell phone and typed “300.” About $60 CAD. He had said 200, about double the normal fare, I later learned.
I didn’t know how to argue. I typed “200?” into my phone. He hammered away at a translation app and after a few minutes held up his phone, which read: “Dog.” I’d been travelling for, and hadn’t slept in, 24 hours, so his argument seemed fair and exceptionally well-reasoned. I paid him the 300, and Dog and I were unceremoniously dumped at the gate to an apartment complex straight from the sketchbook of a nihilist German architect: five grey towers clad in black bars and reflective glass sprouting out of a concrete courtyard with garden boxes full of pale shrubs and dead grass.
It immediately started pouring. I was home.
***
Read the rest of the Faulty Memory China series (so far):
I hate this term, and all the privilege it infers. Throughout my life I have referred to myself as an immigrant when living abroad, except in Lebanon and Turkey, where the line is so wide between immigrants (refugees, migrant workers from Africa, Southeast and Central Asia) and their access to services compared to aid workers, journalists, and multinational corporate hires that the distinction matters deeply. I use the term with no pride here, and use it deliberately to highlight the disparity.
See Footnote 1.