Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation by J. Maarten Troost Page A

instinctually paid the first asking price, bargaining had become second nature to him and he now haggled down everything from a restaurant meal to a cab ride to a bottle of water. It still seemed presumptuous to me to quibble over a restaurant bill, but in China no one ever took offense. One bargains for everything in China, including, apparently, the services of an attractive translator hanging around the Grand Hyatt in Beijing.
    “Let’s get a coffee,” Dan said, having come to an arrangement that was satisfactory for all parties. We walked back toward the Starbucks in the Oriental Plaza, which was just like any other Starbucks, except that small isn’t Tall. It’s just small.
    “China is Starbucks’ second-largest market,” Dan blithely noted, as I stood wondering what, precisely, Meow Meow did for a living.
    As she waited for her frappuccino, I approached Dan. “Just an observation here,” I said, “but in other countries the young women lingering outside swanky hotels aren’t usually translators.”
    “Do you think she’s a take-out girl?”
    “A take-out girl?”
    “That’s what the prostitutes in the karaoke bars are called. But I don’t think she’s a take-out girl. But if she is, just think of her as a full-service translator.”
    “Thanks, Dan.”
    “You’re welcome.”
    We settled at a table and sipped our coffees. “So, Meow Meow,” I began, searching for a way to ascertain her profession. I could, of course, have simply asked her what she did for a living, but I’d spent enough years in Washington, where What do you do? is the template for tedious conversation, that I hesitated. “Your English is excellent,” I offered.
    “No,” she said. “But it is better than your Chinese.”
    Very true.
    “I am a student,” she continued. “I study English.”
    What luck. Suddenly, I felt like I could be helpful.
    “You are American?” she asked.
    It’s a complicated question for a half-Dutch, half-Czech, Holland-born Canadian citizen with a Dutch passport and a green card presently living in California.
    “I live there,” I offered. “Have you ever been to America?” I asked her. She hadn’t. “Well, it’s kind of like this,” I said, waving my hand around the mall. Except this was far nicer. I watched the shoppers mosey about, and reflected that surely this kind of economic transformation had been matched by some sort of social and political transformation. I asked Meow Meow if she discussed politics with her friends.
    “See, in my country,” I said, “we talk about politics a lot. There are two groups—or factions, as I think you call them in China. There is one faction that believes George Bush is a simpleton with the brain capacity of plankton, and that is why we are in the mess we’re in. Then there’s another faction that believes George Bush is not only smarter than plankton, but that he is a diabolical mastermind, possibly even the spawn of Satan himself, and that is why we are in the mess we’re in. Do you have similar conversations about President Hu Jintao?”
    “No,” Meow Meow finally replied. “Politics are more the concern of poor people.”
    Of course, there are 900 million or so of those in China, give or take. The Communist Party has nothing to worry about. Still, I found Meow Meow’s answer revealing. In 1989, it was the students, the children of the elite, who gathered in Tiananmen Square and nearly toppled the regime. Today, students like Meow Meow are sipping vente frappuccinos inside upscale shopping malls. I asked her about what she had heard about the massacre in 1989.
    She looked befuddled. Dan translated. “He’s asking about the events of 6/4,” he said, using the Chinese expression for the bloodshed that had occurred on June 4.
    Meow Meow shook her head. “I don’t know about this. Was it something that occurred during the Cultural Revolution?”
    This, frankly, was a remarkable answer. A little more than fifteen years earlier, the