Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

Hooray, I am back in mellow Dali. What a brilliant idea to come here to write up my notes rather than slug it out in hot, sticky and expensive Shanghai. Much has happened since I was last here. For example, there was a rainbow invasion.

The so called rainbow people are all over Asia. They are uber hippies, wandering the earth, and they host regular rainbow gatherings, where they all get together and do hippy things.

The first rainbow people I met were in Kashgar, in Xinjiang, in the cheapest dormitory in town. These guys wanted to hitch hike to Tibet.

They were really very poor. They had come in on the bus from Pakistan where they had been living in a refugee camp.

They were okay, and good company, except when they decided to sing their dumb rainbow songs. I remember the songs in their entirety as each only had one line, repeated ad anuseum, with bongo accompaniment: ‘We all come from the goddess, into her we shall return,’ and ‘we are the rainbow people, stronger than before.’

One guy was Austrian, a prankster at heart, who didn’t seem that into any of the hippy shit, he just wanted a laugh. He dressed like an elf in green robes and a pointy green hat. He always carried a huge stick. He had a conch shell in his rucksack. He was still getting over the death of his monkey, in the refugee camp.

I went to the Kashgar bazaar with them, to buy provisions for this dangerous journey. I remember being bored and irritated, because they were only interested in the cheapest stuff, for which they bartered furiously. In the end, after a day walking around this enormous central Asian bazaar, they had each accumulated a bag of nuts. Largely on my advice, the bulk of this assortment was made up by stuff that I thought was almonds, only really cheap.

A couple of months later I bumped into them again, in Beijing, in, of course, the cheapest dormitory in town. Now the Austrian guy had Tibetan prayer flags tied to his stick. They had successfully hitch hiked round Tibet, with pilgrims and truckers, but it seems, nearly died of exposure on several occasions.

The almonds had been cheap for a reason – they weren’t almonds at all, just tasted a bit like them, and were toxic; eat more than a couple and you got stomach ache. And they had had to survive on these things for days and days, sat in the back of trucks that ground along unsurfaced roads.

They had got all the way to Mount Kailash, the holiest site in Tibet, and one of the world’s most remote travel destinations. You are supposed to walk round it clockwise, which takes three days, and it brings you good karma and improves your chance of a favourable reincarnation.

Walking clockwise is a big thing in Tibetan Buddhism. Nobody walks anywhere anti clockwise. It’s the first thing you learn. Anti clockwise is the way of Bon, the very weird pagan religion that predates quite weird Tibetan Buddhism.

I walked anti clockwise round a holy site once, for about an hour. I met, of course, all the pilgrims going clockwise, who reacted in horror – tutting, shaking their heads, barking at me to turn round quick. One guy drew a finger across his neck, poked out his tongue and made death rattle sounds. I don’t think he was threatening me, he was telling me I was accumulating bad karma and would die shortly. It was an uncomfortable hour.

Well anyway these mad hippies did the whole three day Kailash kora anti-clockwise, Bon style, backwards, and baffled and consternated thousands of pilgrims. It was a kind of knee jerk anti-conformism. I mean of course they conformed in other ways, but so far as they could they always did things differently. Mind, they said, it was shortly after the anti-clockwise kora that they had nearly died of exposure, so in retrospect they weren’t sure that they had done the right thing.

I started hanging out with the Austrian guy, who was good company. We heard that there was going to be a meteor shower visible over China and conceived a plan to sleep on the Great Wall and watch it. Only it was winter, so the temperature up there would be about minus twenty.

Me and him and this German girl took as much bedding as we could carry and got the last bus up to Mutianyu Great Wall. It was hard to get the Austrian’s stick, which was about two metres long, into a packed minibus, and when we did he was adamant that it not be laid down on the floor. So the stick went along the back of the seats, between the other passengers, who took this imposition rather stoically, I thought.

Having got to the wall the three of us hid on it until they had shut the ticket office and everyone had gone home. Then we made a camp in a guard tower and built a fire. As the temperature dropped we realised that without the fire we were going to get very cold indeed, so we spent hours stumbling around in complete darkness looking for anything that could burn. Still, we figured that this fantastic meteor shower, which would start any minute, would certainly be worth it.

Eventually, inevitably, the fire burned down and we had to huddle round the embers to sleep. And boy did we huddle, like kittens, as the temperature dropped and dropped. We wrapped a scarf round all our six feet to try and keep them warm.

I don’t think any of us slept at all. And we didn’t see a single meteor. Still, never mind, it was a good adventure.

I didn’t meet any more rainbow people until I was in India. They were a lot less interesting there than in China. Pragmatic, matter of fact China is such a non-rainbow country it was funny to see them trying to cope, and the place could frankly do with a bit of dippy weirdness and a bit less obsessive materialism.

But India already has too many western space cadets and new age wierdos for rainbow people to really add anything to the mix.

In Varanassi I had the chance to go to one of their rainbow gatherings. I didn’t bother but my mate C did.

He said that at the start, to kick things off with a suitably communal, anti-materialistic vibe, everyone was invited to put some object that was special to them into a pile and then they would all walk round the pile, hand in hand, and take it in turns to go in and pick something out from the pile. And that would be like, some kind of metaphor for giving up on who you are and accepting the power of chance and being all bonded and whatever.

So they did this ritual, but it did not quite turn out as intended.

Hippies who had contributed a flute and ended up with a shell started complaining that not everyone had taken communalism quite seriously enough. And people who had put in, say, a leaf, and were now the proud owners of a nice embroidered bag, were responding by saying that those other hippies should lighten up and accept their karma and why were they making such a big deal when everything belonged to the goddess anyway.

And the gathering grew so rancorous, and so many arguments started, that the whole thing was in danger of breaking up in a welter of ill feeling on this, its first day.

So it was decided that every object be returned to its original owner. And then they would do the ritual over again.

But now, all the hippies who had previously contributed bongos or jewellery or whatever and ended up with an acorn or an interesting shaped stone were buggered if they were going to be screwed over a second time.

So they put in sticks, stones, leafs or shells too.

And what they ended with was a renunciation-of-materialism ritual in which a bunch of hippies walked round in a big circle, hand in hand, and took it in turns to pick out stuff from a central pile of worthless crap.

Man, I so wish I had been there.

Anyway, Dali and the rainbow people. A bunch of French guys had shut down their bar, TOXIQUE, but there was still some time on the lease, so they said to some rainbow hippies who arrived in town in preparation for their gathering, ah, bien sur, stay here for free. You want to run it as a bakery? Why not.

And then more and hippies arrived, until the ‘rainbow bakery’ was housing around thirty people.

Down by the lake, the owner of the DRAGONFLY said that anyone who was living in a tepee could put it up and stay for free in his garden. Well, how many hippies fit in a teepee? Quite a lot, it turned out. Certainly enough to disconcert his paying customers.

The rainbow bakery did not turn out to be a going concern – the hippies weren’t washing, so perhaps it was the sight of filthy hands kneading dough that put off customers. As an alternative source of income the rainbow people started busking and begging.

Tensions between the hippies and the local community grew. But things came to a head when the media came down from Beijing to record what was going on.

The hippies had to go. A delegation of the resident foreigners was sent down to the bakery to ask them nicely to leave.

The hippies had something called a talking stick, and when they were all gathered as a group, only the person holding the stick was allowed to talk. So the residents sat with the hippies, and the stick was passed from one hippy to another, and a lot of crap was talked about vibes and energies until finally, one of the residents took possession of the stick and rather politely considering, told them please, just leave. Go, no, get out. If you don’t the police are coming.

And so the Dali rainbow gathering never happened, and the rainbow people made no friends or converts. The original hippy who had set it all up turned out to be charging rent at the bakery to all the other hippies. And when the owners of Toxique found out they got so annoyed they punched him and kicked him out of town.

And I suppose I would end there but yesterday I was reading a piece in the Guardian about the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The journalist who wrote it was saying, of course, nobody travels like that any more, the beat spirit is dead blah we’re all comfortable and middle class blah travel is just another form of consumption blah dreadlocks on the Koh San Road blah.

And it made me think about the rainbows. For all their faults – the bullshit and the cultiness – at least they’re in earnest. Some of them at least are truly out there, doing it, on the road, and they don’t give soundbites to Guardian journalists. And I felt a little fonder of them, the good ones anyway. I wished I could remember that Austrian’s name.

The photographer wanted to take pictures of Beijing duck so I took him to this new ‘Imperial’ restaurant I’d read about.

It was one of the most over the top places I have ever seen. As we walked in, robed greeters shouted, ‘the honoured guests have arrived!’ and we were shown into a dining room made out to look like a hall in the Forbidden City. Except there were goldfish beneath the glass floor and a waterfall ran down one wall. The chairs were bright yellow thrones and as well as cutlery there was a flywhisk and something like a sceptre at the table settings.

But never mind the décor, it was the staff who were really striking; all were tricked out in full historical gear complete with elaborate headgear, long fake nails and the like.

We went for the cheapest set meal, about fifteen quid each, which turned out to be pretty good value considering. With some ceremony we were presented with a whole plucked duck, including its head of course, and given a brush and a pot of what I think was its blood and asked to write something on it. As we were going to take a picture of the thing we asked the guy just to write ‘duck’ on it in Chinese. They took it away to be cooked and then brought out an endless succession of courses, starting with fried duck’s webs.

Our waitress said ‘the Emperor of the Tang Dynasty is greeting you!’ and three heavily costumed people came up and bowed; a Tang Dynasty Emperor, the Empress, and a foxy concubine. The man’s hat looked like the top of a Doric column and the queen’s headpiece like a gold pagoda. I guess we should have taken a photo or said hello back but I think we were both a bit shell shocked and unsure how to play along.

Never mind, they just smiled dreamily and continued in stately procession, greeting all the diners. When they left, I though that was the end of the shenanigans, but no, later on we introduced to some Song Dynasty royals, and after that, Yuan, Ming and Qing.

Of course you see pictures of Imperial finery but the full magnificent haute couture silliness of the costumes doesn’t come across until you see someone dressed up in them and trying to walk. It’s as if every dynasty tried to outdo the last in impracticality and colour contrast. Actually what it reminded me of was the most recent Star Wars films; the look of the Chinese court was obviously the inspiration for the dresses of that Queen wotsefarface.

It was all very well done, I have to say. I’m seen attempts at this kind of thing before but they’ve always looked a bit shabby – the robes cheap, and trainers visible beneath them. Not here though; the footwear was period, and the staff must have had deportment lessons. The ‘Imperial family’ had just the same kind of glassily benevolent look that the Queen manages. There was, I felt, a Walt Disney kind of figure behind this, a strong character obsessed with realising his fantasy.

When the roast duck finally came we were quite relieved (though no longer, sadly, very hungry); at least it meant the photographer could do some work. A chef skilfully evicerated the thing for us on a trolley. I’d have thought that would make a great photo, but, partly thanks to the transparent plastic gloves the man was wearing, the pictures looked like illustrations of some grisly medical procedure.

Our waitress plucked pancakes out of the bamboo steamer, slathered them with plum sauce and put on the duck shreds and spring onion and rolled them up into packages. To be honest I’d rather roll my own duck pancakes. But that’s the Chinese idea of luxury – having lackeys hover just behind your shoulder waiting for the moment when they can spring forward and do something for you. It made for some good photos anyway.

It was fun but I think we were quite glad to get out of there. The greeters carried the photographer’s tripod out for him and as we left shouted, ‘Their work over, the honoured guests take their leave!’

We went to a bar round the corner. It was called ‘The World of Suzie Wong’s’, and it was done up like an opium den, with rose petals floating in stone ponds and the like. And just over the road from that was a housing estate of high rise blocks. There was nothing special about the blocks of course, but the entrance to the estate was a giant Proscenium arch, faced with marble, with full size figures of Roman warriors in niches and topped with an equestrian statue. Theatre, kitsch and pastiche – sometimes Las Vegas has nothing on China.

The guide photographer was here. He took my advice and bought a fold up bike. He was diligently riding to all the places on the list I had emailed him which made me feel a bit guilty as I dashed that off in about ten minutes.

I couldn’t believe the contract he was on every single picture he takes is automatically copyright the employer, so even if he snaps me on his camera phone, the resulting picture is not his intellectual property. He could see aliens land and film it and the film would not be his copyright so he wouldn’t be able to make anything from it. I was shocked. I can’t believe that’s legally enforceable.

But apparently that’s how a lot of photographers have to work these days. Digitalisation and picture libraries have made it much harder to make any money at the game. It used to be, if a magazine wanted a shot of the Tokyo Tower they had to send a photographer to Tokyo and pay him well. Now the mag just go to a picture library and choose one out of the million or so shots of the Tower on their files and pay about fifty quid, of which the photographer gets half. Very little travel photography is commissioned any more.

He showed me his portfolio, on his little Mac. He had just come from India(bureaucratic nightmare) and Madrid (full of thieves).

And before that he did Laos. He was asked to take pictures of Akhe tribespeople, so, being the conscientious fellow that he is, he went right into the jungle and hiked for days till he found some of the most isolated tribes in the whole country.

This one village he went to, they didn’t know what electricity was. Just to find some level on which to relate to them, he tried showing them his portfolio (all stored on his I-pod). He had a guide who was translating, saying things like, ‘Look this is the Eiffel Tower, it’s very famous, it’s in a place called France which is on the other side of the world. And the people were like, ‘whatever.’ Whether being shown the Taj Mahal or a flamenco dancer, they just looked at the screen blankly, bored. And the photographer began to think, they just didn’t know how to relate to photos, for them it’s nothing but a little patch of shifting colour.

He was getting worried. Not everyone was happy he was there and the atmosphere was awkward.

Finally, he came to the pictures that he’s recently taken – on the same trip, of another set of Akhe people. And suddenly everyone got really excited, and crowded round, or hurried to fetch their relatives. Every person in the village had to be talked through every picture so he had to spend the rest of the day flicking through these pictures until the I-pod battery ran out. The women in particular were fascinated at the slightly different ways their co-tribespeople did their hair or embroidered their black jackets or wore their jewellery.

Then the village head, not wishing to be out done by the tribe down the road, ordered everyone in the village to put on their best clothes and pose for group portraits. The kids were washed and dressed up and the women put on their finery, which is very beautiful, but it was a bit of a surprise when the men came out to pose holding cigarette cartons.

It turned out that factory cigarettes were status symbols. The cartons were kept unopened, on display, as a sign of a family’s wealth. They were the only non functional objects in the whole place. The village head had three. So, what, thirty packets of fags – worth about a quid – to show you had cash to spare.

It’s easy to romanticise tribespeople living in harmony with nature but God they are poor. On the same trip he saw a village that had just been completely abandoned. Everything that could be carried had gone but the houses and animal stockades were intact. The people had just had enough. They had upped sticks and set off to walk a few hundred kilometres down to the road to see if they could get on better as part of this thing called the modern world. Presumably their only hope of work would be as heavy lifters but they figured being on the bottom rung of modernity was better than where they were.

The Akhe are in China too, all around the Laos border, in Xishuangbanna. China is much more developed than Laos and there is no escaping the modern. I hung out with an Akhe guy in Jinghong, a few years ago, H. He had gone to the big city and made a business selling Akhe embroidered clothes. H cooked me shredded beef with mint, one of their signature dishes, and told me how worried he was about his village.

Xishuangbanna is the poor Chinese man’s Thailand, with a big sex industry, and all the village girls were working as prostitutes in the city. But there was nothing for the guys to do and they still did what they always did. So the girls would go back to the village after a couple of years and marry some local guy, but, H complained, they would have big city ways and a taste for money and the marriages never worked.

H introduced me to his Akhe girlfriend. She worked as a barmaid in the YES Disco, where she wore a red dress covered with sequins. Her high heel shoes were too big for her so she stuffed them with tissue paper. She stayed awake all night on Thai red bull. And she smoked, of course, factory cigarettes.

I wander into a dense crowd of middle aged folk, hundreds of them, mostly women, and most are displaying a piece of paper with a set of vital statistics on it – height, date of birth, education, salary. Is it some kind of job market? No, the print outs remind me of classified ads. It takes me to a minute to realise what’s going on – it’s a marriage market; they’re arranging dates for their kids!

A couple of people carry folders of names, presumably they are middle men to the process. Very few of the ads have pictures attached. These people know what’s important, it’s all about getting your little emperor or empress married off to someone of suitable status who’s not too short, and they’re not going to let looks come into the equation. How very organised and rational. Because obviously people left to their own devices over these issues are apt to let such trivia sway them.

There’s a Chinese expression, ‘nan ren bu huai, nu ren bu ai‘ which means, if he’s not a bad boy, a girl won’t love him. I imagine these parents, after their daughter’s bought home a couple of outlaw bikers (or the Chinese equivalent), deciding to take things into their own hands. I wonder how much the kids are privy to the process? I can’t imagine anyone being particularly happy about the thought of their mother walking around a marriage market with their stats on a placard.

I’m in Renmin Park, which is two minutes walk from my hotel. It’s very attractive and I appreciate it a lot as the city has few green spaces. Rocky paths twist betwee shady groves, and above the tree tops you can see some of the more whimsical skyscrapers. Architects here try to make their tower block stand out by giving them decorative roofs. It’s like an accountant’s Christmas party – all po-faced corporate slickness then boff, a silly hat.

So there’s one building that has what looks like a UFO on its roof, another seems to have had a meteorite crash into it, and I have previously mentioned that the Marriot by my hotel looks like nothing so much as Saruman’s castle off Lord of the Rings.

And there are some bizarre structures inside the park too. Behind the meddling parents is a new art gallery with glass walls, then there’re a trendy bar/cafe on an island which is three storeys of Arabian fantasy, with Ali Baba windows (you can smoke a hookah pipe on the terrace) and next to that is the stolid old racecourse clubhouse, built by the British in the 19th century, and behind that is the aforementioned Saruman’s castle – so you can look out from a bamboo grove and see, in overlap, artsy post modernism, Arabian fantasy, old fashioned British stolidity, and corporate brutalism.

This is not uncommon. In architectural circles ‘Shanghai skyline’ means a dog dinner. And they just keep on building. High rises sprout like mushrooms, like nowhere else on the planet, the greatest spurt of construction in human history. Pudong, on the east side of the Huangpu, was all paddy fields a couple of decades ago. Now, it’s kilometre after kilometre of new build and boulevards.

This isn’t tourist Shanghai – there’s nothing to do here, I only went to get my visa renewed at the new police station – but it is quite an intense experience because so unreal. I got a cab back and we drove for ten, fifteen minutes along almost deserted streets lined by architectural statements and bloopers and Pudong seemed like a scale model of itself; I felt like one of those photoshopped people that architects put in their drawings to give a sense of scale.

K rings at 8am to say she’s drunk, she’s not been to bed yet, she’s been drinking free champagne, she’s quit her job, will we meet her for breakfast.

N is blurry after last night’s cocktails. We went to Cloud 9, the highest bar in the world, on the 87th floor of the Hyatt in Pudong (there are 88 floors in all, 8s being lucky). The view was, obviously, awesome. For once there was no cloud cover so you could see the city spread out and twinkling below like the mother of all Christmas light tangles. The only blackness was the strip of the Huangpu River. The TV Tower next door looked just as daft as in the daytime – the Thunderbirds ship that never got built, the Eiffel Tower on steroids.

But the bar had no atmosphere – hotel bars never do. Everyone who didn’t have a window seat (such as us) kept asking the black clad waiters if and when they could be moved. Some Koreans asked for their Martinis to be taken back because there weren’t enough olives on the stick. Four men lit huge cigars and stunk the place out. To keep the riff raff out there was a minimum spend of 120 yuan per person, that’s nearly a tenner, which, it turns out, gets you one and half weak cocktails.

I discover K was just around the corner, hosting a party called a champagne mixer, for ex-pat movers and shakers. She was doing it every month, she got around 400 people a time, and it was all paid for by the Hyatt. It sounds like more fun than Cloud 9. She is remarkably perky for someone who’s been up all night, talking about job offers and New Year plans.

The year of the pig is imminent. There are decorative pigs everyone and you can even buy a real, flat pig face, eyes and ears and squashed up snout and all, wrapped in plastic and tied with red ribbon, which looks like the kind of thing that gets found in the fridge of a serial killer.

It’s my year; I was born in a pig year. I assumed that this would be lucky for me but K tells me no; when it’s your year you have to be careful, it’s not an auspicious time at all. I ask how this bad luck can be negated. Turns out, it’s easy: red is powerful and lucky and when it’s next to your skin it neutralises ill energies nearby. So – you have to wear red underpants. All year long. It’s not a wind up either; now I realise why I keep seeing them in the shops. Sometimes they have the character for bliss or luck written on them in gold.

The ashtray has coffee grains in the bottom, so that when you grind out a cigarette you get a whiff, not of baccy, but of coffee. A simple idea, obvious when you think about it. I tell K how impressed I was with similar details in Japan.

For example, in H’s house, you could run the bath then just leave it – when the water reaches the desired level, the tap switches off automatically and, even better, a tune plays in the living room to alert you. Then of course you bathe Japanese style, which is to have a shower while standing next to the bath, and only when you are completely clean, get in for a soak.
Everyone shares the same water. When it gets cold there is a button to warm it up.

We go to Moganshan, a load of art galleries in an old factory.
Originally, a bunch of artists used the place as studios because the rent was so cheap. Eventually, as has happened with a similar space called 798 in Beijing, the shabby art galleries will give way to upscale clubs, restaurants and swankier galleries. This life cycle, which might take fifty years in the west, takes five over here; the boutiques are already taking shape.

There is a lot of McStruggle art – that is, images in the socialist realist Cultural Revolution style, of, say, Red Guards or lantern jawed peasants, only instead of little red books they’re waving I-pods or whatever. Foreign visitors love this stuff, ex-pats disdain it, every Chinese artist goes thorough a phase of doing it.

From a teahouse in the old water tower, you can see the area, and it is a typical China mash-up: next to the factory art complex is a real factory, then a half demolished building with an empty fountain out front where feral dogs roam, then a blasted wasteland, then a clutch of brand new high rises.

K bumps into a friend from Luxemburg who does reiki at a spa. I try not to hold this against her. I do not believe in Reiki (massaging the energies – yeah right) and I’m not sure I really believe in Luxemburg either. They whizz off to have lunch on the other side of town. Still, K has not been to bed. I assume that’s the last I’ll see of her today but no; she rings at seven to see if we want to go to a gig. Sure.

A trio of Chinese Ramones wannabes are squealing and thrashing guitars. They’re all got Beatles mop tops. One of K’s gay friends is telling me how he is going to dress as Barbarella for a drag performance. Last week the theme was cowgirls and Indians and he had a holster made and put a water pistol in it and filled the pistol with vodka and went round squirting his pistol in people’s mouths – can I imagine it? Yes I can.

K bounces up. It’s gone 10pm. I don’t want to ask her but by my calculation she hasn’t been to sleep now for 36 hours. She says that she’s going on to Attica, this fantastic new mega club where everyone is up for it. We, however, are not, and return to the hotel feeling old.