China in Ten Words (25 page)

In the second story, people again leveraged marriage to bamboozle the government, but this time in the countryside—an increasingly common practice there since urbanization quickened its pace. China’s long-standing household registration system strictly regulates urban and rural registration. With the rapid growth of China’s cities since the 1980s, huge swathes of land surrounding the cities have been requisitioned by the government, with the result that peasant registrations are reclassified, the so-called rural-to-urban shift. Peasants lose their ancestral homes as well as their land, and in compensation the government moves the displaced peasants into newly built urban housing. Just how much square footage each transferred peasants should get involves a complex computation that takes into account the size of their original house and the number of their family members, but marital status is the most crucial element. Marriage and divorce, remarriage and redivorce, thus become the instruments of deception and subterfuge.

A few years ago, when the land of peasants in a township in southwest China was requisitioned, in order to gain maximum advantage and claim the largest possible compensation when new housing was allocated, almost 95 percent of households went through the motions of divorce and then set themselves up with bogus new marriage partners. The marriage registration office was swamped with applications and had to deal with more paperwork in the space of a few months than it would normally handle in years.

Bizarre turns of event added spice to this collective con. An old lady no longer steady on her feet suddenly hit the romantic jackpot, carried off to the registry office on the shoulders of three different young men, to pick up three different marriage licenses. One man went through with the fake divorce quite happily but then balked at the prospect of remarrying his ex-wife. After much stalling and procrastination, he finally told her the truth. “I wanted to end our marriage ages ago,” he said, “and now at last I had the chance to bamboozle you into divorce.” An old granddad had a phony marriage with a much younger wife and later refused to divorce her. No matter how she wept and pleaded, and even though she promised a severance package, he remained obdurate. Family and friends tried to talk sense into him. “It’s just a charade,” they reminded him. “How can you take it as real?”

His response was heartfelt: “But for me it was love at first sight!”

As the people con the government, so the government cons the people. As China has transmuted itself from a command economy to a market economy during the past thirty years, some local governments have demonstrated their allegiance to the new order by vigorously promoting auction sales of one kind or another. For instance, they might hold a public auction to sell off the rights to name roads, bridges, squares, residential communities, and high-rise buildings, and whichever company made the highest offer would be free to name a place as it saw fit. In 2006, when one city decided to put up place-names for auction, the announcement elicited some furious reactions from the locals.

“If place-names are up for grabs,” some said, “how will people keep track of what’s what and where’s where?”

“Is our housing complex going to be renamed Ladies’ Soother Estates?” others asked sarcastically, referring to the leading brand of vaginal cream.

“When I want to send a letter to my friend, will I have to write the address as Brain Ambrosia Boulevard?” another inquired, alluding to a well-known herbal tonic.

Some took things to their logical extreme, suggesting they might as well put the name of the city itself up for sale—that way they might be able to strike a deal with the Coca-Cola Company and rename the city Coca-Colaville.

Officials rushed to backpedal: “Paid use of place-names is just an idea, and it has yet to be implemented; residents have no cause for alarm. Even if such a system is introduced in the future, it will comply with relevant laws; naming of places will be carefully regulated.”

Given the pressure of public opinion, the place-name auction never got off the ground. But when local officials mention this initiative, they applaud it heartily, declaring that now is the era of the market economy and so things should be done according to market principles; marketable operations are the way to go. These past few years, “marketable operation” has become the mantra of local government officials; sometimes it has given local governments leverage to bamboozle the people. The following two stories are examples of this trend.

The first story took place in Sichuan Province, in the city of Neijiang. There the city management bureau was keen to strengthen its oversight of itinerant vendors, with a view, no doubt, to increasing its revenues, so it announced it would auction off its sidewalks. Now, sidewalks are originally designed to provide foot passage; if they are auctioned off to vendors, they will simply end up carpeted with merchandise, and where will that leave pedestrians? Are pedestrians just going to have to take their lives in their hands and try their luck among the throngs of cars and trucks and buses? When I indignantly reported this development to an official, he shrugged off my concern and told me I was overreacting. He saw nothing absurd about what they were doing. “You’ll find lots of places where sidewalks are being auctioned off,” he told me.

The second story comes to us from the city of Xiangtan, in Hunan. There the municipal government announced that street numbers could be purchased. Chinese people have a superstitious faith in certain numbers, believing that the number six, for example, promises a happy outcome and that eight signifies fortune and prosperity. Residents eagerly splurged on numbers such as 6, 66, 666, and 6666 and 8, 88, 888, and 8888; as a result, street numbering in some neighborhoods went haywire as regular sequences of numbers broke down. In a street that originally had odd numbers on the left and even numbers on the right, when one walked down the left-hand side of the street, one might no longer find No. 5 between No. 3 and No. 7, but No. 8888. Or when one proceeded along the right-hand side, one might very well find No. 6 sandwiched between No. 792 and No. 796. If I were to walk along that street, I wouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

When sidewalks were auctioned off and auspicious street numbers were sold to the highest bidder, the people of Neijiang and Xiangtan may have cursed for all they were worth, but the local officials just went on talking big, bamboozling them with that regular refrain, “This is how marketable operation works.”

All this gives me the sensation that we are living in a fantastic fictional world, in a city called Coca-Colaville whose sidewalks have been taken over by market stalls, where people shuttle nimbly through the gaps left by rapidly moving vehicles like characters in a kung fu movie. Landmarks are differentiated with incongruous names like Black Sister Toothpaste Street, Sixth Sense Condom Bridge, Sanlu Milk Powder Square, and AB Underwear District—every brand in China leaving its mark on the city landscape, from things you eat and wear and use, to furniture and automobiles, lovemaking accessories and paraphernalia for new parents. Street numbers are in random order; every venture down an avenue is like a walk in a labyrinth. Here, where everything is tinged with the mysterious logic of absurdist fiction, Kafka or Borges might feel quite at home. Perhaps one day I’ll write such a story myself.
Bamboozletown
might be its title.

T
here is really no end to these stories of fraud and chicanery, for “bamboozle” has already insinuated itself into every aspect of our lives. If a foreign leader visits China, people will say he’s “come to bamboozle,” and if a Chinese leader travels abroad, people will say he’s “gone to bamboozle those foreigners.” When a businessman heads out to negotiate a deal, he’ll say he’s “off to bamboozle,” and when a professor goes to deliver a lecture, he’ll say the same thing. Social interactions and romantic partnerships fall under this heading, too: “I bamboozled him into being my friend,” you might hear someone say, or “I bamboozled her into falling for me.” Even Zhao Benshan, the godfather of bamboozling, has become its casualty. A couple of years ago a text message appeared on many millions of Chinese cell phones:

Got access to a television? Be sure to turn on CCTV—Zhao Benshan has been killed by a bomb, and the police have sealed off the Northeast. 19 people dead, 11 missing, 1 bamboozled!

The one bamboozled, of course, was the person reading the message.

A friend and I once traveled together to a speaking engagement. Last thing at night he asked me for a couple of sleeping pills. He wasn’t planning to take them, he said, but simply to place them next to his bed as a form of subliminal tranquilizer. “They’ll bamboozle me into falling asleep,” he said with a laugh.

Bamboozlement can also give a new gloss to literary works. There’s a famous line by the Tang poet Li Bai: “White hair falling thirty thousand feet.” It used to be seen as the quintessence of the Chinese literary imagination, but people’s commentary now takes a different form. “That Li Bai sure knew how to bamboozle,” they scoff.

Bamboozling has practically become an essential fashion accessory. In the last couple of years schoolchildren have developed a new fad: buying so-called bamboozle cards, which are the same size as drivers’ licenses. You see vendors hawking them on city streets and pedestrian bridges: “Bamboozle cards—one yuan each! With bamboozle card in hand or purse, bamboozle the world for all it’s worth!”

“Hereby it is certified,” the cards read, “that Comrade So-and-so possesses distinctive technique and rich experience in bamboozling; few are they who can avoid being duped.” The bamboozle card is embossed with a round, official-looking stamp just like other Chinese identity cards; its issuing authority is the National Bamboozle Commission. Schoolchildren greet each other by pulling out their cards and waving them in each other’s faces, like FBI agents flashing their ID in a Hollywood movie—the ultimate in school-age cool.

The rapid rise in popularity of the word “bamboozle,” like that of “copycat,” demonstrates to me a breakdown of social morality and a confusion in the value system in China today; it is an aftereffect of our uneven development these past thirty years. If anything, bamboozling is even more widespread in social terms than the copycat phenomenon, and when bamboozling gains such wide acceptance, it goes to show that we live in a frivolous society, one that doesn’t set much store by matters of principle.

My concern is that when bamboozling unabashedly becomes a way of life, then everyone from the individual to the population at large can become its victim. For a bamboozler is quite likely to end up bamboozling himself or—in Chinese parlance—to pick up a big stone only to drop it on his own foot.

I imagine everyone has probably had this kind of experience: you try to bamboozle someone, only to end up bamboozling yourself. I am certainly no exception, for when I look back at my own career, I find many such examples. What follows is one such case.

If I remember correctly, my father was the target of my first scam. When I didn’t want to do something he wanted me to do, or if he was about to punish me for doing something I shouldn’t have done, I often resorted to my own form of leverage: feigned illness. It would have been called deception then, but now we’d call it bamboozling.

It’s in every child’s nature, I daresay, to try to deceive or bamboozle his or her parents. I was in elementary school by then and aware that there was something wonderful about my relationship with my father. We were kith and kin, in other words, and even if I did something outrageous, I would be unlikely to suffer fatal consequences. I have forgotten exactly what led me to feign illness that first time; all I know is that I was anticipating some form of punishment, and I wanted if at all possible to avoid it. Pretending to be racked by fever, I shuffled with faltering steps toward my incensed father.

After listening to my tale of woe, my father reacted instinctively: he reached out a hand and planted it on my forehead. Only then did I realize what a colossal mistake I had made—I’d forgotten that he was a doctor. Now I’m in for it, I thought: not only would I not escape punishment for my original misdemeanor, but I would surely incur further punishment for this new offense.

Miraculously, my bamboozle managed to slip in under the wire. When my father’s discerning hand established that I didn’t have the slightest temperature, it didn’t seem to occur to him that I was trying to pull the wool over his eyes. He simply expressed outrage that I had not engaged in any healthy exercise that day. I received a stern dressing-down: no longer would I be permitted to loll about the house—I needed to run around outside, even if it was just to get a bit of sun. There was absolutely nothing wrong with me, my father declared; my only problem was that I was so averse to activity. Then he told me to get out of the house. I could do whatever I pleased, but I was not to show my face again for at least two hours.

Out of concern for my health my father’s anger had suddenly changed direction, making him forget my transgression of a few minutes earlier and the punishment he originally had planned for me, and allowing me unexpectedly to get off scot-free. I ran out the door and kept going until I had reached a safe distance; there I stood and reflected tensely on my narrow escape. I must never again pretend to have a fever, I concluded, no matter how desperate the situation.

Thereafter my acting performances revolved more around internal disorders. There was a year or two, for example, when I often pretended to have a stomachache, something I was able to carry off quite convincingly. Because as a child I was very picky about food, I often suffered from constipation, and this helped provide a plausible pretext for my stomachaches. If I did something wrong, I’d feel a stab of pain in my belly as soon as I saw my father’s face darkening.

At the beginning I was fully aware that I was simply pretending to be ill, but later it became a conditioned reflex. All it took for me to have a stomachache was for my father to get angry, and soon I found it impossible to work out whether the pain was genuine or imaginary. However, to me that was a minor point; the main thing was my father’s reaction, for his anger would at once shift to questions of diet and what I chose to eat or not eat, and he would warn me that if I persisted with my food phobias, I wouldn’t just suffer from constipation; my physical growth and intellectual development would be compromised as well. Once again his health concerns made him forget the punishment he should have administered; even if he was now even more furious than before, I accepted his rage with equanimity, knowing it would not result in any disciplinary action.