China café

The woman was rolling on the ground, screaming and smashing the dirt with her fists. A man was trying to calm her. In the middle of the road was a pair of child’s trainers, almost side by side. A policeman was taking photos as passersby looked on.

As I drove by slowly, I pieced together what had happened. There had been a hit-and-run on a long stretch of road where a junction is hidden in trees. There’s a shop on the corner and the victim—a boy—lived there with his aunt during the school week.

Shortly before I came upon the accident, a black car had overtaken me on a blind bend and sped away. Farther down the road, after the accident scene, I spotted the car again. Two men were getting out of it, walking to a white car with a smashed windscreen and a dented bonnet. I slowed and wound down the window.

“Who are you and where do you live?” one of the men asked. I drove off quickly.

The boy died on the way to hospital. The policeman who had taken him there was back at his desk when the culprit was handed in by his gangster friends. They had a gambling den round the back of the mountain. But it wasn’t worth risking it for one of their gang who had been so stupid.



I felt pathetic relief when I heard. I was still wondering if I should step forward as a witness. It is not always a good idea to interfere in the legal process in China. To my shame, I am glad that I won’t have to take the stand against a local gangster.

Piers Morgan and me

I went to Shanghai to give talks to chambers of commerce and a book club. I was also interviewed by Piers Morgan for his ITV travel programme, but he didn’t mention me in his Daily Mail column so I won’t write about him in this one. I’m obviously not famous enough, which is no bad thing.

The talks concerned my previous life as a Shanghai-based magazine publisher and the sudden and (for me) tragic end to it. Despite the fact that it happened five years ago, the story is still popular. Judging by the turnout, I still have a certain notoriety on a local scale—nothing like Piers’s worldwide renown of course, but then apparently no one recognised him in Shanghai.

I told my story (see Prospect, April 2006) to the foreign business executives and entrepreneurs, slipping in my warnings about building a business in a one-party state where that party has the monopoly to end all monopolies. On camera, I gave Piers the “dissenting voice” that he said he was looking for. In between talks, I wandered the streets that I used to know well. Of course they have changed. The side street where I lived is packed with coffee shops, restaurants and boutiques.

After a few days in China’s leading commercial city, whose motto is “Better City, Better Life,” its spell began to work again. It does look good. It does seem that opportunity waits round every corner.

But I’ve been there and done that, and it’s a façade. I gave myself a slap and ran back to the mountain. It’s time for someone else to be a locally famous failure.

First snow

The snow came early this winter, in November. Both roads up the mountain were closed. The mobile market that arrives every morning couldn’t get up the hill. There are no shops in the village that sell food. The water froze in exposed pipes.

Moganshan village is a nationally run tourist resort and not the responsibility of local government, so nobody came to clear the roads. The pensioners were left to fend for themselves. Many of them (there are less than 200 residents) had already left to stay with younger relatives in town.

My family has also moved to a town apartment, but I stay up on the mountain most of the winter. It makes an excellent writer’s retreat. Thus I found myself hiking uphill one snowy Monday morning.

I fell in with a street sweeper carrying a bag of rice for an old relative. The postman strode down the hill past us. “Off to get the post,” he said. The husband of the local nurse was adjusting the snow chains on his car. He overtook me later and dropped his wife off at the village clinic, then drove down again. Above the high street a tiny old lady, bundled up against the cold, was inching her way home. In one hand she gripped a walking stick, in the other a plastic bag containing vegetables donated by a restaurant with no customers.

The village was doing what it has always done: taking care of itself.