Age of Ambition (16 page)

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We landed in Frankfurt in heavy fog and gathered in the terminal as a full group. We ranged in age from six-year-old Lu Keyi to his seventy-year-old grandfather, Liu Gongsheng, a retired mining engineer, who was escorting his wife, Huang Xueqing, in her wheelchair. Just about everyone belonged to the New Middle-Income Stratum: a high school science teacher, an interior decorator, a real estate executive, a set designer for a television station, a gaggle of university students. There was nothing of the countryside about my companions—the rare glimpse of a horse grazing in a French pasture the next day sent everyone scrambling for cameras—and yet they had only begun to be at home in the wider world. With few exceptions, this was everybody's first trip out of Asia. Li introduced me, the lone non-Chinese member of the group, and everyone offered a hearty welcome. Ten-year-old Liu Yifeng, who had a bowl cut and wore a black sweatshirt covered in white stars, smiled up at me and asked, “Do all foreigners have noses that big?”

We boarded a gold-colored coach, where I took a window seat and was joined by a tall, rangy eighteen-year-old in a black puffy vest and wire-frame glasses. He had dark bangs that dipped beneath the rim of his spectacles and a suggestion of whiskers on his upper lip. He introduced himself as Xu Nuo; in Chinese, the name means “promise,” which he liked to use as an English name. Promise was a freshman at Shanghai Normal University, where he studied economics. His parents were seated across the aisle. I asked him why his family had chosen to travel rather than visit relatives over the holiday. “That's the tradition, but Chinese people are getting wealthier,” he said. “Besides, we're too busy to travel the rest of the year.” We spoke in Chinese, but when he was surprised, he'd say, “Oh, my Lady Gaga!,” an English expression he'd picked up at school.

In the front row of the bus, Li Xingshun stood facing the group with a microphone in hand, a posture he would retain for most of our waking hours in the days ahead. In the life of a Chinese tourist, guides play an especially prominent role: interpreter, raconteur, and field marshal, with a duty to relay more than facts; as a Chinese guidebook put it, the guide should “express approval or disapproval, praise or opposition, pleasure or contempt.” Li projected a calm, seasoned air. He often referred to himself in the third person, “Guide Li,” and he prided himself on efficiency. “Everyone, our watches should be synchronized. It is now seven-sixteen p.m.” He implored us to be five minutes early for every departure. “We flew all the way here,” he said. “Let's make the most of it.”

Guide Li outlined the plan: we would be spending many hours on the bus, during which he would deliver lectures on history and culture, so as not to waste precious minutes at the sights, when we could be taking photographs. He informed us that French scientists had determined that the optimal length of a tour guide's lecture is seventy-five minutes. “Before Guide Li was aware of that, the longest speech I ever gave on a bus was four hours,” he added.

Li urged us to soak our feet in hot water before bed—he said it would help with jet lag—and to eat extra fruit in order to balance the European infusion of bread and cheese into our diets. Since it was the New Year's holiday, there would be many other Chinese visitors, and we must be vigilant not to board the wrong bus at rest stops. He introduced our driver, Petr Pícha, a phlegmatic former trucker and hockey player from the Czech Republic, who waved wearily to us from the well of the driver's seat. (“For six or seven years, I drove Japanese tourists all the time,” he told me later. “Now it's all Chinese.”) Guide Li had something else to say about the schedule: “In China, we think of bus drivers as superhumans who can work twenty-four hours straight, no matter how late we want them to drive. But in Europe, unless there's weather or traffic, they're only allowed to drive for twelve hours!”

He explained that every driver carries a card that must be inserted into a slot in the dashboard; too many hours, and the driver could be punished. “We might think you could just make a fake card or manipulate the records—no big deal,” Li said. “But, if you get caught, the fine starts at eighty-eight hundred euros, and they take away your license! That's the way Europe is: on the surface, it appears to rely on everyone's self-discipline, but behind it all there are strict laws.”

We were approaching the hotel—a Best Western in Luxembourg—but first Li briefed us on breakfast. A typical Chinese breakfast consists of a bowl of congee (a rice porridge), a deep-fried cruller, and perhaps a basket of pork buns. In Europe, he warned, in his most tactful voice, “Throughout our trip, breakfast will rarely be more than bread, cold ham, milk, and coffee.” The bus was silent for a moment.

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We never saw Luxembourg in the daylight. We were out of the Best Western by dawn and were soon back on the Autobahn. Li asked us to make sure we hadn't left anything behind in the hotel, because some of his older travelers used to have a habit of hiding cash in the toilet tank or the ventilation ducts. “The worst case I've had was a guest who sewed money into the hem of the curtains,” he told us.

We headed for our first stop: the modest German city of Trier. Though it was not a household name for most first-time visitors to Europe, Trier has been unusually popular with Chinese tourists ever since Communist Party delegations began arriving, decades ago, to see the birthplace of Karl Marx. My Chinese guidebook, written by a retired diplomat, described it as the “Mecca of the Chinese people.”

We descended from the bus onto a tidy side street lined with peaked-roofed, pastel-colored buildings. The cobblestones were silvery with rain, and Li donned a forest-green felt outback hat and pointed us ahead as he started walking at a brisk pace. We reached No. 10 Brückenstrasse, a handsome three-story white house with green shutters. “This is where Marx lived. Now it's a museum,” Li said. We tried the door, but it was locked. Things were slow in the winter, and the museum wouldn't be open for another hour and a half, so Li said that we'd be experiencing Marx's house only from the outside. “The sooner we finish here, the sooner we get to Paris,” he had said. Beside the front door was a brass plaque with Marx's leonine head in profile. The building next door was a fast-food restaurant called Dolce Vita.

Li urged us to stay as long as we wanted, but he also suggested a stop at the supermarket on the corner to buy fruit for the ride ahead. We milled around awkwardly in front of Marx's house, snapping photographs and dodging cars, until one of the kids pleaded, “I want to go to the supermarket,” and tugged his mother toward the bright storefront. I stood beside Wang Zhenyu, a tall man in his fifties, and we looked up at Marx's head. “Not many people in America know about him, right?” Wang asked.

“More than you might think,” I said. I mentioned that I'd expected to see more Chinese visitors.

Wang laughed. “Young people no longer know anything about all that,” he said.

Wang was thin and angular with the bearing of a self-made man. He had grown up in the eastern commercial city of Wuxi and had been assigned the job of carpenter, until economic reforms took hold and he went into business for himself. He now ran a small clothing factory that specialized in the production of wash-and-wear men's trousers. He didn't speak English, but when he was building his business he'd decided he needed a catchy, international name, so he'd called the company Ge-rui-te, a made-up word formed by the Chinese characters that he thought sounded most like the English word
great
.

Wang was an enthusiastic tourist. “I used to be so busy but now I want to travel,” he said. “I always had to buy land, build factories, fix up my house. But now my daughter's grown and working. I only need to save up for the dowry, which is manageable.” I asked why he and his wife had chosen Europe. “Our thinking is, go to the farthest places first, while we still have the energy,” he said. Wang and I were among the last to arrive at the supermarket. Our group had lingered in the Mecca of the Chinese People for eleven minutes.

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Until recently, Chinese people had abundant reasons not to see the world as a place for pleasure. Traveling in ancient China was arduous. As a proverb put it, “You can be comfortable at home for a thousand days, or step out the door and run right into trouble.” Confucius threw guilt into the mix: “While your parents are alive, it is better not to travel far away.” Nevertheless, ancient Buddhist monks visited India, and Zheng He, a fifteenth-century eunuch, famously sailed the emperor's fleet as far as Africa, to “set eyes on barbarian regions.”

Over the centuries, Chinese migrants settled around the world, but poverty stood in the way of leisure travel, and Mao considered tourism antisocialist. It wasn't until 1978, after his death, that most Chinese gained approval to go abroad for anything other than work or study. First they were permitted to visit relatives in Hong Kong, and later, to tour Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia. The government remained acutely wary of the outside world. In 1996, my first year in Beijing, it reformed migration laws to make it easier for Chinese to go abroad, though the rules still required people to be “politically reliable” and explicitly excluded anyone found to be “highly individualistic, corrupt, degenerate, or immoral.” The next year, the government cleared the way for travelers to venture to other countries in a “planned, organized, and controlled manner.” China doled out approvals with an eye to geopolitics. Vanuatu became an approved destination only after it agreed not to give diplomatic recognition to Taiwan.

When government departments began sending people abroad, they sought to prepare the pioneers for every eventuality. A 2002 guidebook called
The Latest Must-Read for Personnel Going Abroad
warned that, beyond Chinese borders, “foreign intelligence agencies and other enemy forces” wage a “battle for hearts and minds” using “reactionary propaganda to topple the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party.” If a traveler on official business encountered a journalist, the authors offered a strategy: “Answer in a simple way; avoid the truth and emphasize the empty.”

Eighty percent of first-time Chinese travelers were traveling in groups, and they earned a reputation as passionate, if occasionally overwhelming, guests. At a Malaysian casino hotel in 2005, some three hundred Chinese visitors were issued meal coupons bearing cartoon pig faces. The hotel said that the illustrations were simply to differentiate Chinese guests from Muslims, who don't eat pork, but the Chinese tourists took offense and staged a sit-in, singing the national anthem. In some cases, first-time travelers left mixed impressions on their hosts, and after a few incidents the Beijing government published a handbook,
The Chinese Citizens' Guide to Civilized Behavior Abroad
, which had a list of rules, including:

3. Protect the natural environment. Do not trample on green areas; do not pick the flowers and fruit; do not chase, grab, feed or throw things at animals.

6. Respect people's rights. Do not force foreigners to take pictures with you; do not sneeze in the direction of others.

Nobody in our group was inclined to throw things at animals. The more I read, the more I wondered if the authors of
The Chinese Citizens' Guide to Civilized Behavior Abroad
hadn't been outclassed by the citizens. Most countries begin to send large numbers of tourists overseas only after the average citizen has a disposable income of five thousand dollars. But when China's urban residents were still at half that level, travel agents made such travel affordable by booking tickets in bulk and bargaining mercilessly for hotels in distant suburbs. “Every route is largely determined by the plane tickets,” Li explained to me. Wherever the cheapest flights were on a given day, Chinese tours saw opportunity. That was why our route resembled the Big Dipper: it started in Germany and looped through Luxembourg and into Paris, before a long southerly swoop through France, over the Alps, and down into Italy as far as Rome. It might have ended there, but instead it did an about-face and doubled back to Milan.

Europe, initially, was an afterthought. In 2000, more Chinese tourists visited tiny Macau than visited all the countries of Europe combined. But the opportunities did not go unnoticed. Accor, the French hotel group, began adding Chinese television channels and Mandarin-speaking staff. Other hotels moved beds away from windows, as dictated by feng shui. The more the Chinese went to Europe, the cheaper tours became. By 2009 a British travel industry report had concluded that “Europe” was such a successful “single, unified” brand in China that individual countries would be wise to put aside pride and delay promoting “sub-brands” such as France or Italy. Europe was less a region on the map than a state of mind, and bundling as many countries as possible into a single week appealed to workers with precious few opportunities to travel. “In China, if you can get ten things for a hundred dollars, that's still better than getting one thing for a hundred dollars,” Guide Li said.

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I strolled back to the bus from Marx's house with a young couple from Shanghai: Guo Yanjin, a relaxed twenty-nine-year-old who called herself Karen and worked in the finance department of an auto parts company, and her husband, Gu Xiaojie, an administrative clerk in the department of environmental sanitation, who went by the English name Handy. He had an easy charm and the build of an American football player—six feet tall and barrel-chested. His sweater was maroon and bore an appliqué of a golf bag, but when I asked if he was a golfer, he laughed. “Golf is a rich man's game,” he said.

Handy and Karen had saved up for months for this trip and had also received a boost from their parents. Guide Li had urged us not to ruin our vacations by worrying too much about money—he suggested that we pretend the price tags were in yuan instead of euros—but Handy and Karen kept an eye on every cent. Within a few days, they could tell me exactly how much we'd spent on each bottle of water in five countries.