Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

The last time I was in Jinghong it had a thriving backpacker culture – banana pancake cafes and cheap guesthouses. The backpackers had been drawn by culture and nature; now there was less of both, and the backpackers had largely gone, to be replaced by high rolling Chinese tourists, who generally are happy to be given a packaged experience – an ethnic dancing show, a visit to a nature reserve, maybe some illicit gambling.

Where once there were twenty guides to take roughing it types into the jungle, today there are only three.

My guide was called Mister Rush. His nickname might was from his eagerness to ask questions in English class, but it seemed an appropraite moniker when I was following him through the rainforest, as he set a hell of a pace. He was a compact, slim man from Hubei, precise in his gestures and clipped in his diction, and like all the guides and trekkers I’ve known, had an independent minded and philosophical bent. He had five years spent working as a beekeeper, travelling with his bees up and down the country.

He bemoaned the contemporary Chinese obsession with money but still, spent a lot of time talking about it – what is the average salary in your country, why does a nurse get less than a banker, what difference a welfare system makes, and so on.

We walked to a Hani village. The Hani until recently had lived in the mountains until the government asked them to come down.

The village was the usual scruffy collection of buuildings – chickens pecking, dogs barking, the smell of shit, plastic scattered everywhere. The wooden huts where they dried the crops were much more appealing, to my eyes, than the crudely built houses. One dwelling at the top of the village was markedly better than the others, with shining blue roof tiles and a neat yard. This guy had made it rich as a middle man and rather than move away he had stayed with his neighbours to lord it over them.

The walls were painted with big character slogans about aids, or building socialism. One read ‘boys and girls are equal’. This hints at a big problem in the Chinese countryside; smaller families and the wish for a male heir means that there is now a big gender imbalance – lots more men than girls. Which has led to the practise of bride buying; really poor families sell their girls to men who can’t find wives. A girl costs about twelve thousand yuan, apparently – just over a grand. And with girls suddenly so lucrative, kidnapping has become a problem too.

From there it was a short hike to a tea factory. Here the tea leaves were dried in the open air, then fermented – left basically – before being pressed between heavy stone blocks into bricks. The point being that these are stable (unlike green tea, which spoils), and easy to transport. This ‘black pu’er cha’ was once sent from here on the tough trek to Tibet.

It was a great location, with beautiful views of the forest; if I had to work in a factory, I would choose this one. The staff were locals but the boss was from Hong Kong. As ever, it was noticeable that even in minority areas, the entrepeneurs and money makers – like my guide – were Han.

Then we hit the forest. The trail was barely discernible, and often Rush had to hack the foliage back with a machete. Inevitably perhaps to a westerner of my generation, it brought memories of Vietnam war films. The butterflies were lovely, but there wasn’t much wildlife to be! seen, as it was all in the bush. Heard lots of birds though, above the buzz of insects which was so incessant it was like tinnitus. The bamboo clumps were huge, sometimes twenty metres, and grew in clumps. Sometimes holes had been hacked into the hollow interior, made by locals picking out grubs to eat. A sense of profligacy, lushness, thick meaty leaves everywhere, tremendous agglomeration of visual detail but all in only one colour, green.

We arrived after dark in a Jinuo village, and ate a meal (including some of the aforementioned grubs, fried in chilli oil) with a local family. The head of the house went hunting at night with a homemade gun – the animals would not run from light at night. He talked about how a decade ago a group of hunters in his village had been shot by the government for killing an elephant. And he told an apocrychal story about a villager who, angry with an elephant for eating his rice, shot the elephant’s kid. The angry elephant, so ! the story goes, went to the guy’s house and killed his wife.

These mountain people were small, wiry and taciturn. They weren’t particularly welcoming or interested in us, they just got on with their business. They worhsipped the sun, and every house had a painting of a sunrise on the roof eaves.

The next day we hiked through a rubber plantation. It was boring – rubber is non native, and takes up so much water that nothing else grows around it. Bowls or broken bottles collected the white sap. Farming rubber is hard work – every day the trees have to be cut at three in the morning. The locals don’t like to do it and employ even poorer people from elsewhere in China. The labourers lived in bamboo huts inside the plantation. The price of rubber has increased in recent years, everyone is busy trying to get rich, and little of the forest is now left. The only animals I saw now were six inch long, bright red poisonous centipedes. The track was busy with guys on motorbikes bearing plastic vats full of raw rubber, which rather resembles tofu.

We came down to the plains and a prosperous, neat Dai village. Some guys were betting on fighting cocks. It’s kind of like acrobatic sumo, with the birds jumping at each other, diving and pivoting as they look for advantage. It was impressive to watch one bird launch itself feet first in a big attack and see the other duck right under the aggressor, turn and attack from behind.

These people were much friendlier – we were given water chestnuts, some ladies invited us to hang out with them on hammocks slung between the stilts that hold their buildings up. Dai men all have tattoos – the older ones have abstract designs of dots but the younger guys sport snakes and dragons. The Dai language has its own script, unlike other minority languages and Dai people are said to look down on their less cultured mountain neighbours. They have certainly adapted to modern China better than most minorities.

And that was my jungle trek. It left me with the desire to see more of the real thing. Apparently it’s possible not far from here to arrange to be slipped over the border into northern Burma – opium factories, tribal militias, head hunters – now that would be an adventure.

There are almost a hundred dwarves living in Dwarf Kingdom, a theme park attraction outside Kunming. Every morning they put on a show for visitors.

The compere is a midget, about two foot tall – he looks like a child but he has an adult’s confidence and economy of movement. He explains that he is 38 years old and the audience gasps. Then he introduces all the dwarves, who emerge from out of hobbit hole style buildings with little round doors and assemble on stepped platforms. They are all in costume: dwarf guards with swords and shields, girls dressed as fairies with little wings. Last to emerge is the dwarf king, wearing a yellow cloak and carrying a sceptre.

Then the show starts: a trendily dressed dwarf with bleached hair breakdances, a dwarf boy band mimes to a pop song, a dwarf tranny prances in a bikini and a wig, a troupe of girls dance with umbrellas, and so on. I was called up on stage to help with one act. The midget compere had me check that two little metal ballbearings were real. I was asked to put one in a strongman dwarf’s mouth. His face contorted grotesquely, and, with the aid of a metal chopstick, he made the ball come out of the side of his eye. Then the other ball. It was gross. Perhaps it was a trick.

After the show the dwarves hung around playing cards, eating lunch, or making trinkets to sell, so I got a chance to chat to them. The youngest dwarf in the community is 18, the oldest is 55. They come from all over China, having heard about the kingdom off the internet or from friends. The place was the singular vision of a Sichuan businessman, a ‘big person’. They do not really live in the hobbit holes, but they do all live together in a dormitory nearby. They are paid 1300Y a month, about 130 quid – not a bad wage for China, especially considering they get free food and accommodation.

The ones I talked to were very happy to be there. As well as getting a livelihood they felt part of a warm and close-knit community. Relationships had started there, there had already been two marriages, and another one was happening later this year. They had chosen their ‘king’ themselves, by election, and it seemed that he did really wield some authority – in that sense at least it was a real kingdom.

I had gone there sceptical, with a prurient desire to see a freak show and at the same time criticise it. But honestly, after meeting the charming, confident dwarves, I felt my cynicism evaporate. These people were going to get gawped at whatever they did – why not make a living at it? It was typical Chinese pragmatism – I was reminded of the way blind people are trained to become masseurs. And they really did think of the place as theirs, and to derive strength from numbers. So it was a surprisingly touching experience.