Week 51.25

I shot these photos on an iPhone 17 Pro Max and emulated three classic Chinese B&W film stocks with AgBr: Lucky SHD 100, Friendship 100 Pan Film, and Shanghai GP3 100. The idea was to get the look of road trip snapshots from the 1990s that a traveler then might have taken.

11 greatly biased observations from a first trip to China

• The Great Firewall does indeed block the majority of household internet names in the west. Imagine testing if you’re online, what would you type in the address bar of your browser? Google? Nope. Any Facebook property? All social networks and chat platforms don’t work, with the exception of iMessage. However, this only applies to hotel WiFi networks and those provided by local ISPs. If you’re roaming on a cell network while using a foreign provider’s SIM, things work as expected (albeit routed through Chinese servers). I decided not to bother with VPNs and just trusted in HTTPS 😬

• Powerbank rental machines are ubiquitous, even in places where you should never leave a box full of lithium-ion batteries, like out on the street in direct sunlight. You pay a few cents per hour (via QR code), and because they’ve landed on a common battery design between the many operating brands, it seems you can return one anywhere else after you’re done charging your devices. It’s great not having to carry your own around, but even given a high degree of civic integrity, I think getting adoption in a country where everyone already has their own (like Singapore today) would be tough.

• When it comes to Hainanese chicken rice, I’m afraid the student has become the master. It seems a pretty sure bet that you can buy a plate from any stall in Singapore and it will be tastier, better prepared, and more beautifully presented than the “original” wenchang ji we encountered in Hainan. You’ll have to take my word that their yellow-skinned, gamey, bone-ridden chicken chunks served on bland rice is an entirely different dish. I don’t know how, but our immigrants really cooked with their version.
• Okay perhaps there’s something to the difference in tastes that evolve from being here. Chinese breakfasts at hotels are wild from a western (or Singaporean) perspective. I wasn’t expecting to experience this much culture shock but people have herbal chicken soups, sour cowpeas with chicken offal, steamed corn on the cob, and some things I’ve never seen — first thing in the morning. I made a beeline for the foreign foods section, only to find “American ham” slices submerged in hot water.

• I saw restaurant advertisements featuring surprising imagery: interiors filled with hundreds of people, scenes so chaotic you could hear them through the photos. Where the western sensibility is to show empty spaces that potential customers can imagine themselves enjoying alone, Chinese consumers want the communal experience? Or maybe popularity is a signifier of quality. It reminded me of how most hotel websites never show any guests crowding the common areas. AI fixes this.

• In a smaller city, we were brought to a historic “old street”, where architecture from the 1920s still stands in the form of dilapidated buildings. The ones still safe enough — not blackened by burn marks, overgrown with creepers, and with their roofs intact — are actually occupied by residents and shopkeepers doing things not too far removed from the 1920s. Cutting hair, drying fish, and weaving baskets. State-approved tour buses pull up to these zones and deposit tourists where they might run into flies buzzing over meat, or a dead rat lying in the street, as we did. In Singapore, this level of historical preservation would be unthinkable. The buildings would have become a street museum of restored replicas, their interiors cordoned off, only to be viewed from afar. The barbers, fish filleters, and basket weavers replaced by bronze statues. To be fair, we saw this done in a larger city. The variation in developmental effort within just an hour’s drive can be vast.

• The real estate oversupply crisis is interesting to see firsthand. In many places, unfinished buildings clad in scaffolding, and in other sites where tourism has withered, there were abandoned shopping centers and developments with their former shopfronts and signage still intact. So much effort and resources spent halfway, giving their towns a feeling of condemnation and hopelessness. Will it ever be reversed? And how?

• Molded plastic garden chairs are the dominant form of seating in rural areas. Their radioactive reds, flaming oranges, and candy pinks pepper the natural landscape and color village streets. Some inventions really do change the world.
• We saw a live show in Sanya that featured some truly impressive stagecraft. At one point, a ship appeared and a wave of water flooded out from underneath it, creating an ocean directly on the stage. This, along with lasers and flying platforms, and suspended mermaids overhead. Equally impressive was the Chinese man in front of me who streamed the entire one-hour production on a video call to his partner who was lying in bed at home, her face visible at maximum screen brightness throughout.

• I thought Japan had a lock on using nonsensical decorative English (Engrish) but, as usual, China is ahead. To the point of complete deconstruction — they have brand names that are just random characters, without following any rules that might lead to plausible words. Perhaps you’ve seen some of these brands on the Amazon marketplace; I’d always assumed they were generated to give a single seller multiple fake brands to hide behind, but now I think they may be actual serious businesses. I walked down a street of clothing stores and it was like having a dyslexic stroke: LZTLYLZT, CUSHU, AV.DE D.JOAO IV, alongside the delightful MANHARD and many Polo Ralph Lauren clones with names like Chris Polo.

• Everyone from my hairstylist on down warned me about the toilets in China. I expected they might be quoting from outdated information, but no, there have been some truly bad places to pee in. I won’t go into the details but know my toes will never fully uncurl. Fortunately, I was somewhat prepared because I’ve literally had nightmares about toilets like this.

Of course, things may be very different by the time next time we visit, given the announcement of new free trade policies in Hainan this week.