Happy Chinese New Year
I'm sitting at computer number 045 at Sensation Internet.Club in Jinghong in China's southern Yunnan Province. A young woman with a red handbag and a white sweater sits to my right playing an Internet Dancing game and chatting with some friends online.
Computer number 046, to my left, is one of the few vacant stations in the place; the other hundred or so computers are occupied with young Chinese playing computer video games, drinking cans of Fanta and chain smoking Honghe brand cigarettes. The place is dark, hot and filled with smoke.
Jinghong is the last big city on the way to the Laotian and Burmese borders. Only 94,162 people live here, according to a 2007 census, small by China standards, but big enough to have an airport and three bus terminals. It also has a port on the Mekong river where once a day a speedboat whisks passengers to Chiang Saen in northern Thailand, a seven-hour journey for 800 Yuan.
I'm not prepared to spend that much on a boat ride, so later today, I will hop on a bus and eventually reach the Laotian border by land. I'm headed south, and will eventually end up in Cambodia, where rooms are $2 a night and cold beer is a quarter.
I'm traveling cheaply. I'm wearing a week-old beard, which thins out into bald patches on my cheeks and chin (it's not very attractive). Outside the one open window in the corner, I can hear the faint banging of metal on metal — evidence of China's “construction boom” — a conversation in some dialect I've never heard, and the occasional honk of a car horn. The open window does little to alleviate the smoky situation in the room.
Earlier, I left my cheap hotel room with the hard bed and spotlessly clean Asian-style squat toilet, and rendezvoused up with some fellow travelers that I met earlier. Like them, I'm on vacation. Nearly everybody in China has a least a week or more off this time of year. It's Spring Festival time, a very important holiday for Chinese people across the globe. Its main day of celebration is Chinese New Year (the Chinese calender follows the lunar cycle, this year the new year falls on Feb. 8), when families gather together to eat Chinese dumplings (a symbol of prosperity for the coming year), and to light fireworks (to celebrate and ward off evil spirits).
For foreigners working in China who do not have families to visit, the Spring Festival means a month-long vacation. Many take the time to travel, and that is exactly what I've been doing. I left Baoding on Jan. 18 at 11 p.m. with my friend and coworker Natty. We took a train south, a journey that lasted 30 hours. We had bunks to sleep in and brought plenty of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
When we arrived in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, it was almost 6 a.m. We spent two days in Chengdu before moving on to Kunming, 18 hours away by train. In Kunming we stayed at a youth hostel near the Jing Ma (Golden Horse) Arches, in the center of town.
It was here that I woke up over 24 hours ago, startled by loud emotional voices erupting in a sudden argument outside my door. As I lay in bed festering about being awake at 6 a.m. on my vacation, I noticed that the voices were speaking English, but with foreign accents. After the argument seemed to be over, I got out of bed and watch the morning arrive from the balcony of our hostel. It was a beautiful morning, and I sat there writing and chatting with a few other travelers nearby for a little while. At the hostel, I met many people from all over the world. Some from Germany, France, Bangladesh, and even one from Worcester, Mass.
And, as I was speaking to all these different people, I discovered that they all had two very distinct things in common.
First, they all possess an intrepid spirit; they wouldn't traveling in China without one. It takes a sense of adventure and an immense amount of patience to deal with the transportation system and the millions of other travelers one encounters along the way.
The second thing they all have in common is that they all speak English. English seems to be the common language because nearly everybody in the world, but especially in Europe and China, people study English from a young age. Whenever travelers encounter each other or need to ask the hotel staff something, communication is almost exclusively done in English.
Yesterday, after I arrived in Jinghong, I was wandering a main street looking for a place to stay when I spotted a foreigner porting a heavy pack walking in the same direction. Before I could even say hello, she crossed the street and asked me, in French-accented English, “Are you looking for the Dai Youth Hostel?” I laughed and said, “You're lost too? Yeah I'm looking for any hostel. Are you French?” She nodded and asked, “Yes, how could you tell?” It was her French guidebook that gave her away.
We both arrived in Jinghong that morning on separate sleeper buses (the kind with three columns of five foot beds, just short enough to not sleep in), and we were both looking for a place to crash. Neither of us speaks much Chinese, so we had to rely on what little we knew to go from place to another in search of a pair of beds. It was not very difficult, as most places have some English-speaking staff. While Julie, the French girl, speaks four languages, it was English and a little Chinese that found us a place to stay. She tells me that she has yet to come into any problems traveling in China, but her knowledge of English is indispensable to her experience. Armed with this, she can speak to nearly every traveler she meets and can always find her way around any Chinese city.
I think countries around the world have the right idea in teaching children a second or third language. America should do the same. I think it would help bridge the growing cultural and ideological gap between the United States and the rest of the world. That said, I think I need to get out of this stuffy room and go bridge some gaps myself.
Chris Gauthier is a recent Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts graduate who is spending a year in China teaching English at Hebei University. He is writing regular columns for The Advocate during his stay in China. To read all of his Advocate columns, visit blogtheberkshires.com. Readers can also read more about his experiences on his own blog at chrisinchina.wordpress.com.