Conversations with interesting people

One of the nice things about our trip was the long conversations we had with people we met at hotels or on buses.

One of them was Joe, a French-Canadian marketing guy who has been living in China for twelve years.  He had lots of stories about great business ideas he’d had that were outright stolen from him. He bemoaned the fact that he was “addicted to China” (his exact words).  I tried to probe the nature of this addiction, which was inexplicable to me, given his experiences there.  But he was never able to articulate his reasons.  He said when he first came to the Lijiang/Shuhe area, where the air is so clean and the landscape so beautiful, he felt tremendously relaxed and rejuvenated, and immediately moved there.  He’s been there for two years now.

Casey was a young mother from Shanghai who was staying at our hotel in Shuhe.  Lillia had great fun playing with her seven-year-old son.  Casey had recently left her job to help care for her parents-in-law, who are both dying of cancer in neighboring Jiangsu Province.  Her father-in-law has stomach cancer, and her mother-in-law has lung cancer, though she had never smoked in her life.   Casey was pretty convinced that the toxic environment in eastern China was at least partly responsible for their cancers.

Tina was an Austrian woman in her early thirties who has been living in Shanghai for the better part of a year, studying Chinese.  When her boyfriend finishes his Ph.D. in Austria, he’s going to join her there.   She says that on a really good day in Shanghai, the pollution index is more than double the worst pollution ever recorded in her hometown near Vienna.  Even so, she too seemed addicted to China, although she didn’t put it that way.  But she’s wondering what to do when she wants to have kids, which she’ll have to do soon.  Is it right to raise kids in such a toxic environment?  She told us about the joke that was going around Shanghai this spring when all the dead pigs came floating down the river: “Isn’t China a great country?  You can smoke all the time without ever having to buy cigarettes, and now when you turn on the tap, you get free pork soup!”

Elaine was a thirtyish woman from Shenyang in the Northeast, vacationing in Yunnan with her parents.  She had gone to college in Canada and had stayed on for a total of ten years.  Then she returned to China to take a job in Beijing.  She has been there for two years, and now plans to get back to Canada as soon as she possibly can.  She said the pollution in Beijing this year was so much worse than she had ever experienced before.  Also, she was a little tired of the mind-set in China right now.  She said everyone is just focused on making money, to the exclusion of everything else.  Maybe in twenty or thirty years people will start to care about other things, she said hopefully, but right now it’s all about the money.

It was amazing how all these different people came around to the same themes.  There seems to be an awful lot of discontent in the Middle Kingdom these days.