China café

My neighbour blames me for foreign tourists. I’d sympathise more if he wasn’t a foreigner too
August 27, 2009

I know a couple who have just lost their life savings and their retirement home at the same time. They had spent their nest egg on an apartment set aside for their retirement in Wukang, the town nearest the bottom of the mountain. At a certain age, locals usually retreat to the town because utilities such as water and electricity work all year round, unlike the mountain top where they break down in the winter.

The couple are not victims of the recession or a bank collapse. Instead, their son stole their home. The theft was artless in its simplicity. The son—who is well known as a gambling addict—told his parents that his girlfriend would only marry him if he could prove he owned a property. His parents lent him the deeds of their flat, and he returned to them a high-quality photocopy. He used the real deeds to sell the flat and pay off almost all of his debts.

His mother discovered what had happened when she called in the decorators to smarten the flat up for her son’s impending marriage and found that someone else was living in it. Apparently she fainted on the spot. The son has now disappeared.

The mother, however, blames my wife and me. If we hadn’t sacked her son from his job as a cook at the coffee shop then he would never have got into so much trouble. In China, when something goes wrong, you find someone else to blame for it.

BLOODY FOREIGNERS

The customer was distraught, and also confused. A young British guy, he had just been swimming with his Finnish girlfriend in a reservoir below the mountain. Everyone knows the place. It is a popular swimming hole for the locals and not a few foreigners. I swim there most days in the summer and usually have company.

When the couple were leaving the lake, a man had approached and ranted at them to get out of his “secret swimming pool.” He had finished with: “You can tell that f…ing Mark guy that if he f…ing well sends any more people down here then I’ll f…ing kill him.” The British guy had happened to come into our coffee shop after his swim, but had no idea who he was talking about.

Now, if this had come from the farmer who grows peaches around the reservoir or a local who had purchased the swimming rights then I could understand, though the language and threats would still be excessive. But the abuse was actually coming from a foreigner. He rented a farmhouse in the hills as a weekend retreat at about the same time that my wife and I first leased our house on the mountain top. When we opened the coffee shop, the man came round, pretending to wish me well yet also asking “please don’t bring too many people here and spoil it.” Those being the people who were coming anyway, and for whom the coffee shop was set up.

I am now blamed for every intrusion into this man’s peace and quiet. I wish I could say that I feel for him but it is almost funny—except for the people he abuses.

PROPAGANDA AND HYPOCRISY

One of the reasons that the man hates me is that every time he meets a local at the pool—or anywhere else—the first thing they tend to say is: “We’re friends of Mark.” They think of it as an ice-breaker. And the man suffers another paroxysm.

But the people often don’t know me but just know my name, perhaps through the media. We just had another round of press coverage, sparked by an article about me on Der Spiegel’s website, which was lifted word for word by a national newspaper—with all criticisms of China deleted. The article was spotted by the local television station who came to interview me. This consisted of them listing the facts in the newspaper and asking me to confirm them, off camera. I was then filmed performing my repertoire of photogenic tricks: make a cup of coffee, read a book, write a book, and do some gardening. It will be broadcast with the between-the-lines message: how international and progressive we are to have a foreigner living and working in our county!

In other words, pure propaganda. Then there’s the hypocrisy. They make a song and dance about a foreigner being here, but can I put the coffee shop in my name along with my wife’s? Can my name be on the lease of our house? Can I get a work permit? Can I get a work visa for myself or foreign staff? The answer to all those questions is, of course, no. We were told by the Labour Bureau, for example, that a coffee shop can be run perfectly well by a local.