Searching for Breath of Fresh Air – Chengdu, China

Searching for Breath of Fresh Air
Chengdu, China

The first thing you notice on arriving in Chengdu is a sudden deterioration in air quality. China boasts nine out of ten of the world’s most polluted cities. Chengdu is by no means the worst of them, and there are few cars here, as China’s economic miracle has not really reached this far inland. Nevertheless, after a few days in the country, you do notice that something is very wrong with the air you’re breathing. The pollution must be industrial, but after a few hours, you stop noticing it. It is this adaptability of mankind that may prove our undoing. We can put up with almost any level of pollution, and won’t start to really do something about it until we’re a few hours from choking to death on it, and by then it will be too late. With this happy thought in my head, I left the bags in my musty hotel room, guarded by some 1950’s furniture, old world charm, and peeling wallpaper, and set off into Chengdu.

Chengdu, in central China, has a population of about 5 million and a history that spans over a thousand years. As with most Chinese cities, history has been destroyed by war, progress and indifference, and little or nothing of its history survives. The city contains wide boulevards, some faceless communist architecture even Stalin wouldn’t be proud of, and an enormous number of bicycles, which by some perpetual miracle, manage not to collide into one another.

We went to the People’s Park, which was full of pensioners doting over chubby grandchildren. We sat in a teahouse, fought off the touts, desperate as always to clean my boots and loath to take ‘no’ for an answer, and watched them play. Sociologists tell us that the extended family has been replaced by the nuclear family, but no-one told China, and people continue to live three generations to a flat in relative harmony. Both parents usually work, and upon retirement, the grandparents settle down to a life of bringing up infants. As they themselves probably had full-time jobs when their own children were growing up, it is often their first experience of full-time parenting, and judging by the happy scenes in the park, they seem to enjoy it. I imagine the one-child policy makes things easier for them.

Indeed, Chinese pensioners seem to be a great deal happier than their western counterparts, who are left to rot away in old-folks home or die in freezing flats; unwanted, frightened and considered a burden by a society that has moved on. Their Chinese counterparts, on the other hand, are respected and seen to play a vital role.

In the park, it was mainly grandmothers who watched over the toddling ‘little emperors’ while the old men gathered in groups and played cards, mahjong or held impromptu discussions. Some of them still wore blue Mao suits and eyed me suspiciously, and I wondered if things got nasty whether I could outrun them or not. They had the numbers, but I still had my own teeth.

What they were discussing, I have no idea, but they seemed quite animated. It all seems so much better than a semi-circle of pensioners in an old-folks home in England, rotting zombie-like around the inane nothingness that is daytime TV.

After the park, we visited an ancient temple, luckily not central enough to have suffered the same fate as an even older temple, whose name I’ve forgotten, which was demolished to make room for an enormous Mao statue during the cultural Revolution. The temple was full of Taoist devotees dutifully leaving incense sticks at various Buddha images. It kind of surprised me, as the Chinese I met had always seemed uninterested in religion, but of course, my knowledge of what Chinese think or don’t think is limited to classroom discussions, and as the PSB (Chinese police) often operate incognito, students were always careful about what they said or didn’t say in class. Expressing a strong religious affiliation still makes your loyalty to the Party questionable, in spite of all the religious freedom propaganda the Party’s been spouting lately, so if you have strong religious convictions in China, you tend to keep them to yourself.

The temple’s monks were a lot less colourful than their saffron-robed Thai counterparts, and held in far less esteem, needless to say. However, the horrors of the Cultural Revolution are long since passed, and monks are no longer forced to attend re-education sessions, take their monasteries apart brick by brick and rebuild them as barracks, factories or even pig sties. Buddhism, under the ever watchful eyes of the Party, does appear to be making a slow comeback in China, but it’s hard to imagine it ever occupying a central role in people’s lives again. Even in Hong Kong and Macao, where Buddhism was never suppressed, it is somehow ephemeral and almost irrelevant to people’s daily concerns.

However, one should always beware of ‘false prophets’ and I could be mistaken in believing that because the Chinese don’t talk about religion much, it is not important to them.

We ate at a vegetarian restaurant in the temple complex. The tofu meat imitations were some of the most impressive I’ve ever had – it tasted so real that Sandra couldn’t eat it. She said it was just so much like real meat that it had to contain some meat. I had no such qualms, and trusted the monks not to slip me a piece of pork on the sly. I must have eaten nearly a whole chicken’s worth of spicy tofu, and paid for it later that night with some terrible stomach pains. Sichwanese food is very hot and spicy, and infinitely preferable to the greasy slime so characteristic of southern Guangdong cuisine.

To distract me from my red hot intestines, we spent the evening at a Sichwa opera, puppet show and shadow dancing ‘extravanganza.’ A purist might object that it was touristic, and to an extent it was, but 90 percent of the audience was Chinese, so I didn’t mind so much. Later, in Beijing, we forked out 25 dollars for an ‘authentic’ Beijing opera, in which 90 of the audience was western, and I couldn’t see any difference.

The costumes were psychedelic and almost other-worldly. The characters in Chinese opera usually represent Gods; such as the Money God, the Pride God, the God of Compassion etc. This explains the bizarre make up, the inhuman grimaces, and the screeching voices. As an ignorant westerners, I was completely lost and hadn’t the foggiest idea what was going on. It felt as though I had been transported to a different planet, where strange bipedal life forms occupied time and space in much the same way as I did, and appeared to be using sound as a means of communication, but what were saying or doing was unknown and unknowable. If astronauts are ever sent as emissaries to study new life forms, they should first be sent to see a Chinese opera to let them know in advance how little they can expect to understand. Captain Kirk had an easy time of it when he went off to meet ‘new life and new civilisations’. I wonder what Bones would have made of the opera characters. “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.” Yes, indeed.

The following day, we dragged ourselves out of bed at 6:30 to see some pandas in Chengdu’s world renowned ‘Panda Breeding and Research Centre.’ You have to get there early in the morning when the pandas like to eat and play. Otherwise, you just get to see them engage in their other favourite pastime – sleeping.

There’s no getting away from the fact that pandas are cute. I read somewhere that we find them so irresistible because the black markings around their eyes exaggerate their eyes’ size. Oversized eyes remind us of babies, which we are hard wired to find adorable. Pandas are also fluffy, another admirable characteristic in animals, although less so in babies.

There are only about 1,000 pandas left in the wild, and with the remaining bamboo forest being eaten up by human expansion, their future or lack of it may be determined by the success or failure of breeding centres like this one, and according to the breeding statistics proudly displayed on the wall of the museum, this is by far the most successful breeding centre. It’s the sex capital of the world, as far as pandas are concerned. There’s probably a Hugh Hefner panda somewhere around, publishing PlayPanda.

Pandas are very fussy animals. They will only eat bamboo, and only certain types of bamboo, in spite of having the digestive tract of a carnivore which is entirely unsuited to digesting it. Indeed, they often die from digestive problems.

They’re also very fussy about when they’ll mate and who they’ll mate with, and so artificial insemination is often used to get around this problem. You can’t help wondering though what goes through the mind of a panda when she realizes she’s pregnant but hasn’t had sex. Does she suspect the miraculous intervention of the Holy Panda Spirit? Does she therefore expect to give birth to a Messiah, a Jesus, a King of the Panda People?

We happily watched the pandas stuff their face on prime bamboo, and panda cubs frolic about for a few hours in the dewy mist, and then headed back into the smoggy pollution of Chengdu.

Pandas are so high profile, and government so keen not to be seen to let their extinction happen, that they’ll probably survive. The fate of other less lovable animals in much more grim. Although the Chinese government is unique in the world for having the balls to face the population problem head on and limit the number of children to one per family, this policy is far from a success. The economic miracle means that Chinese pollution levels are increasing dramatically, and will increase a lot more, thereby further weakening an already fragile ecosystem. Yet again, I wonder if the planet can afford a rich China. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) may find, in twenty year’s time, that it has saved its emblem from extinction, but little else remains.

Only 1,000 pandas left – enough for a couple of tower blocks, perhaps.