Luna sets me straight. “It’s so my husband can concentrate on his job. It’s supposed to preserve the stability of our marital relations.” In other words, Lenovo pays Luna to stay home and keep her husband happy. I am stunned. I can’t decide whether this is horribly retro—paying women to stay home—or wonderfully cutting-edge—putting a cash value on running a household. After Scarlet, Luna is the second person I know who just wants to be a housewife.
Based on unscientific observations, I’ve noticed that a culture’s personal space is inversely proportional to its population density. Take Finland, which has only one-third as many people as the entire city of Beijing. On a recent trip there with Sam’s hockey team, I saw a Finnish man waiting impatiently—two meters behind a Canadian dad—at a salad bar in Lohja, population 41,400. The Canadian took his sweet time filling his plate, unaware someone was waiting for access to the pickled herring. In Canada, the salad-bar norm is about two bowls’ distance. In China, the person behind you would be digging into the same bowl, then leapfrogging you in the line.
Linguistically torturing offspring is an overseas Chinese tradition, the solemn duty of the Chinese diaspora.
Ben says another reason for China’s rapid development is the lack of civic opposition. Before the masses fully wake to up the notion of property rights, the Communist Party is sending SWAT teams into neighborhoods armed with buckets of red paint. They daub a single character on any building destined for destruction: chai. It rhymes with “buy,” and it means “demolish.” The character is so ubiquitous that a British friend in Beijing tells me her little girl recently asked, “Mommy, is that why they call it Chai-na?”
These are the desperate dealing with the desperate. A middle-aged man picks through a mound of second-hand clothes. He tries on a pair of trousers over his shorts, and starts to bargain, hard. The vendor shakes his head. The man is insistent. He presses money into the hand of the vendor, who still refuses, pushing the crumpled bills back. Each side tenses. They are one yuan—fourteen cents—apart, and the difference matters to both.
Alfred says he tolerates a moderate amount of corruption as a fact of doing business in Beijing. “If water is too clean, there are no fish,” he explains, quoting another Chinese proverb.
“In Mao Zedong’s era, we worked so hard and we were always hungry,” he says, swallowing a mouthful of Coke. “Now, as long as we don’t speak about politics, our economic development is fast. We say in five years the world market will be ours. Let them discuss politics at the very top of the government. We’d rather not ourselves.”
I have heard of Rose Garden, on the outskirts of Beijing. It was renowned as the most expensive, over-the-top housing development in the city. Their villa had five bedrooms, six bathrooms, his-and-hers saunas, a table-tennis room, a pool-table room, a library and a swimming pool. He eventually realized it was too big and too much trouble. “When you don’t have something, you really want it. When you get it, you realize how much work it is to have so much. It was so tiring to barbecue all the time. We had to clean the pool every two days. I had to sit with guests in the sauna. We had to buy lightbulbs by the case.”