Dispatch #2 from Kunming, China

Tue 3/19/02 8:46 AM

In this Chinese city of 3.3 million, there are few outward signs of communism.

On the contrary, Kunming is a grimy, bustling semi-metropolis teeming with commerce. It has more in common with what I expected to find, and did find, in Hong Kong than with what I expected from Red China.

There is a bank on every corner, and there are people buying and selling things literally everywhere. Even the walls of the pedestrian walkways that cross below busy intersections are lined with clothing dealers. There and in the many bazaars, if you show even the slightest interest in something, the proprietor often will punch the price into a pocket calculator and hold it up it to you. If you frown, he (or more typically, she) will hand over the calculator to let you lodge a counter offer. It’s a simple enough mechanism through which I’ve managed to make a number of transactions, all without need of exchanging a single word.

This is good, too, because hardly anyone here speaks English, and we’ve met only one or two folks whose skills approach partial fluency. We can’t read any of the signs, either. But somehow we’re getting on, and getting around, just fine. We have a map of the city that’s labeled in Chinese and English. When we get in a taxi we point with a pencil to the spot on the map (with the Chinese label) where we want to go. When we want to go home, we show the driver the card from our hotel which is printed in Chinese on one side.

There’s even a Wal-Mart in Kunming — three low-ceilinged storeys of merchandise priced so inexpensively as to make an American Wal-Mart feel like a Rodeo Drive boutique. Pop CDs for $1.25, bicyles for $14, and live eels — yes, live eels, and also some variety of aquatic turtle — for $1 per kilogram. I didn’t catch the prices on the dried fish (that aisle didn’t smell too good, so I didn’t tarry), though I noticed in the aisle-of-hanging-dried-sides-of-livestock (located next to the tupperware and thermos aisle) that for $4 you could buy what appeared to be the better half of a medium-size pig.

Which reminds me, unfortunately, I haven’t eaten yet and must now sign off and go do so. Actually, even if the ingredients don’t look so hot, Yunnanese food itself is quite good. The specialty of the province is a dish called across-the-bridge noodles. There’s an interesting story behind the name that makes the name make sense, but personally I think they should be called across-you-shirt noodles because that’s where the greasy things end up when I try to pick them up with chopsticks.

Thanks for reading!

Cheers,

Jeremy

Sun 3/17/02 6:25 AM

Dear Friends,

We’re now in Kunming, capital of the Yunann province of the People’s Republic of China. We’ll be here only long enough to arrange permission and transportation for the Burma road, then we’ll head out. In the meantime, we’re enjoying spending $12 USD per night for a hotel room and $1.25 USD for all-you-can-eat buffets.

Yesterday we were in Macau was a colony of Portugal from some 400 years ago up until 1999 when they basically dumped it into Chinese hands. It’s now a Special Administrative Region of the PRC, as is Hong Kong, only its ties to the mainland government are stronger than those of HK. It’s ties to HK, however, are quite strong and of a more or less carnal variety.

Macau is to Hong Kong something like Atlantic City is to New York City and Philadelphia. Since about 90% of Macau’s deal is hookers and casinos, and seeing as we arrived on the 9am ferry and departed at 3 in the afternoon, Chris and I missed entirely what most visitors come to Macau entirely for. (The one taxi driver we had in Hong Kong who spoke any English explained to us that one can get, so to speak, more bang for his buck in Macau: “Thousand dollars in Hong Kong,” he said, “no happy. Thousand dollars in Macau — happy! happy! happy! Haw haw haw!” [a grand HK is about $150 USD]).

To the casual tourist’s eye, Macau consists of a lot of overcrowded, substandard high rises and a lot of overcrowded diesel buses filled with Chinese tourists (who are every bit as avid with their picture taking as the stereotypical Japanese tourists, let me tell you). Meanwhile, I had come to Macau expecting some kind of Sino-Latin feel. But other than bilingual signage in Portuguese and a number of mediocre “Spanish colonial” style edifices, I didn’t find what I was looking for.

There were a few highlights. The view across the harbor to the Chinese mainland from the Sao Paulo ruins was, as they say, breathtaking, even while shrouded in mist (the weather’s not been great so far this trip) which imparted a bit of ominous mystery.

On the advice of a German whom we met on the ferry, we ate lunch at the Clube Militar de Macau (special, higher non-member price: 130 palacas [20 bucks]). To my knowledge, Portugal is justly unknown for its cuisine, though the meal we had at the Club was quite tasty and perhaps the best Portuguese food I’ve chanced to eat. I especially liked the pickled broadbeans, which are like super-sized limas with a prominent black streak down the trailing edge.

The most interesting thing we found in Macau was a performance of a Chinese opera, which we stumbled upon on a market side street. It seemed an unlikely spot for such an event, but we rounded the corner and there it was, on an elevated, permanent stage, with a further elevated orchestra pit and bona fide PA system (because, I guess, the gongs and cymbals need to be louder than they already are). P.J. O’Rourke once described Chinese music as sounding like a truck full of windchimes colliding with a stack of oil drums during a bird call contest. The opera had a tinge of that but was altogether listenable, if inscrutable. There was but one other foreigner in the crowd, and we stood beside a pile of stinking durian fruit and watched the show for about ten minutes, thrilled by our first real Chinese cultural experience.

Now we’re in the PRC, but other than noticing that the newly minted currency features Mao (I mean, would the Germans, if they still had their own notes, put Hitler on them?), I’m reserving even first impressions.

Regards to all,

Jeremy

Subject: Dispatch from Hong Kong

Dear friends,

As I travel the world for the next three months, I’ve promised to keep in touch with all of you as much as possible. Please feel free but not obligated to reply to these dispatches.

I arrived in Hong Kong two days ago, rendesvouing (did I spell that right? I don’t think so) with my travelling partner and good friend Chris Robbins, whom I met in college, and who is cutting class for the next month in order to join me here in Asia. We’ve been doing the usual HK tourists things (the Star Ferry, etc.), but being us, we’ve also done a few unconventional things.

We started out by having dinner at the Foreign Correspondents Club with Kin Ming Liu, who runs the Apple Daily, the second largest Chinese language paper in HK. Kin Ming used to be on the editorial side of the paper, where he ran several articles by both Chris and me, carefully translated into Cantonese.  The Apple Daily is highly critical of the Beijing government, and it’s reporters are not welcome in mainland China. Kin Ming enjoys being an unapologetic pro-market radical, however, and we enjoyed hearing is stories and his view that the Brits made a mistake in handing back HK to the PRC in 1997.

Chris, a third-year law student in Miami, was interested in the court system here in HK. Thus we spent this morning in the district court in Wan Chai listening to the case of ???, a young Chinese man who swam here from the PRC several months ago. Upon his arrival, he wanted (understandably) a bath. His mistake was to reach through someone’s open window to steal a bottle of shampoo. He was seen, caught, and arrested. He has plead guilty to immigration charges, which comes with a mandatory 15 month jail term, and says he is not guilty of burglary, the other crime he’s been charged with. Burglary carries a sentence of 3 years, and the sentences are consecutive, meaning the poor guy would spend more than 4 years locked up only to be sent back to the mainland regardless. Sort of a Jean Valjean situation, it appeared; just substitute Prell for a loaf of bread.

Apparently, illegal immigrants are treated this harshly because if they were not (the fear goes) HK, over night, would have more people flooding its borders than it could possibly tolerate. In between sessions we talked to the defendant’s legal aid solicitor, a haughty Liverpudlian who talks exactly (and even looks a little) like Paul McCartney (“Well, your lordship, that’s a rahther serious charge now, isn’t it?”).

Afterward, the prosecutor, a 36-year old Hong Kong Chinese woman wearing a black robe and a white wig like Rumpole of the Bailey, invited us back to her office for a tour of the supreme court. All of this was an interesting glimpse into the HK judicial system.

This afternoon, we paid a visit to Gunnar Moberg, the just-arrived CEO of the just-created Skandia Asia Pacific Ltd., a subsidiary of the company I used to work for. Skandia is venturing forth into the Asian long-term savings market and Mr. Moberg explained to us, among other things, what doing business with the PRC is like. Skandia’s negotiating a business license there. Encouragingly, he said that 5 years ago, when he first went to Beijing to open negotiations, he was meeting with government officials who were uniformly mid-60-year old, party line men who barely spoke English and hadn’t much of a clue regarding financial markets. Now, though, the officials holding these very same positions are 35-year old women with MBAs who speak perfect English. He thinks people will be surprised as how quickly things change for the better and open up in China. I hope he’s right.

Until next time,

Cheers,

Jeremy

And writing about it.

From internet cafes in China and Cambodia, to a shipboard laptop on a Cook Islands schooner, I committed my notes and stories and observations to paper. At the time (and for all I know, still) Yahoo! had a strict cap on the number of recipients an email could have. And so, from March to June of that fair year, the most important 100 people in my life at that time received about a dozen “dispatches” — this is what I called them, and each was headed that way: “Dispatch from XYZ”; for some reason, I was assiduous about headlining them thus, but they’ve all been rechristened more interestingly now, for the retelling.

Anyway, at the end of the trip, I compiled the dispatches, along with The Wall Street Journal article I’d written in New Zealand about some Burmese comedians in Mandalay, into a single PDF:

E-mail dispatches by Jeremy Hildreth
To his friends, relatives, and colleagues
From several locales of Asia and the South Pacific
During the author’s travels through those regions
In the first half of the year 2002
Containing descriptions, impressions and reflections
Of dubious import and interest
But collected here
For your amusement
As originally composed
Typos and all.

In that form, the dispatches have been languishing on my hard drive ever since, for I then got caught up in writing a book proposal about Pukapuka (one of my stops on the journey), trying hard to get an article about the trip published in The Atlantic Monthly (to impress a girl I once met on Nantucket, if you must know), living the Oxford life, and then, somewhat later, becoming a branding consultant and place brand expert.

Which brings us up to date, then.

Now, on their 8th anniversary (if Spinal Tap released a 17th anniversary edition, I can have an 8th), I’ve decided to begin republishing the dispatches on my web site to give them the airing and wide readership they sort of, somewhat, in some places deserve.

Well, let me clarify: I like to act like the writing’s mediocre, but in fact I’m extremely fond of this sub-body of work of mine. It’s fluid, fresh-eyed and from the hip — maybe more so than anything I’ve mustered since — and it got better as the trip wore on. Kurt Loder of MTV News, one of the lucky 100 who got the dispatches in real time, was kind enough to declare: “Whoa. Think you may be singlehandedly extending the Golden Age of travel writing.” (Kurt, if you’re reading this, I’m still grateful for that remark. And if you don’t believe you said it, I can show you the e-mail.)

To my eye today, this is the travel writing of a talented, exuberant beginner. Like the splendid debut album of band with more and better in store, it has unique and unrepeatable charms. It’s cliche to say it, but I really do sincerely hope you enjoy reading these postcards from the East half as much as I enjoyed writing them. (And thanks, Mom.)

The original dispatches were image-less ASCII text emails; I had to paint scenes using my words alone, which was a fine challenge, a superb exercise with some pleasing results (the description of the jetty on the Irrawaddy at dusk, or the recounting of the Phnom Penh prison tour — there are some stellar turns of phrase within). But on the trip, I also took some of the best photographs I’ve ever taken, all shot with an Olympus 35mm “ZLR” loaded for bear (or temple monkey) with Kodak Gold 200; I used up something like 30 rolls, and had them processed by a phenomenal boutique lab in Providence, Rhode Island who printed them on matte paper with white borders…just glorious. This time around — call it a brand refresh — I’ve put in a few photos.

Oh, one last thing: Before I left on the trip, I read voraciously (a lot of Paul Theroux and Somerset Maugham — that sort of thing). One book I remember was Justin Wintle’s 1988 travelogue, “Heat Treatment: The Oriental adventures of an amorous hypochondriac.” The book was okay, but the title was great, and it inspired me (and still makes me chuckle).

Back then, however, I had no inkling of the amorous potentials of travel and I was certainly no hypochondriac. Indeed, I knew nothing of the world, or how to take it in, from direct experience. I was 26. My passport was only two years old. I’d been to about four countries in my life.

But I had time. And the youthful me sensed — and the older me knows it for sure — that when you have time, it’s time to hit the road.

And in those dispatches — these dispatches, I should say, which you are about to read, dusted off and enlivened with photographs — mark the beginning of a vital personal journey as a professional and as a human being. They show me tasting the world, and engaged in the process of getting to know places, for the first time in my life. They show me, I hope, becoming both more myself and more worldly.

Indeed, these dispatches, and the storybook-worthy odyssey that spawned them, contain many of the seeds of my current life. And I treasure them for that.

1. In Hong Kong, a shampoo Jean Valjean
2. Macau confidential: “Happy! Happy! Happy! Haw! Haw! Haw!”
3. My first encounter with Communist China: And I’d thought Wal-Marts in America were cheap!
4. Outskirts of Bangkok: The monk, the BMW and the Death Railway
5. Burmese days: The road to Mandalay is paved by 8-year olds
6. Exploring L’Indochine: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Tomb Raiders
7. Singapore: One oppressively nice place
8. Sojourn in Sydney: Surf’s up! Wombats ho!
9. Van Dieman’s Land: The Alcatraz of Empire
10. The Cook Islands, where life imitates Gauguin
11. The South Seas by cargo ship: Have corpse, will travel
12. Suwarrow Atoll: “The only place in the world where there are no women”
13. The gentle giants of Manihiki’s pearl-crossed lagoon
14. The summing up: Around half the world in 88 days