Nanjing Notes-2007

It is a horrendously cold day, in this city of 7 million. An elegant and modern city now, it is also one of the oldest cities in China, inhabited through the ages by no less than seven Chinese Dynasties. Literally, it means South City, just as Beijing, which is to the North, means North City. Arriving late to the hotel that evening, I went to the adjacent mall to shop for a sweater or something warm. This mall was the equivalent of Taka in Singapore, only worse. Not a piece of rag could be had for less than 2800 Remninbi, or about 600SGD. This is what one pays to fly to India from Sing, so the decision-making was devilishly simple. I simply was not going to buy something from here, especially since I had winter wear of Michiganesque proportions in Singapore, unofficiously relegated to the confines of the unreachable loft in the bedroom. But the general discomfort of cold weather, something I had quite forgotten in recent times, could hardly be ignored. So what on earth to do? I ventured outside the hotel and started walking along a major highway. At the first intersection, I turned right following the general pedestrian traffic. Luckily, I found a shopping arcade which had only Chinese scripts painted on the walls and billboards. Stepping in, I soon found what I wanted. A navy-blue longneck which had a label emblazoned on it. The label said “Lacrosse”, in the same font as “Lacoste”. Memories of one Rohan came flooding back from 1994. We were in college in India and Rohan, as we called him, had informed us that his Dad was going on a business trip to Kenya. He had asked his dad to get him a pair of Reeboks and a pair of Levis jeans, commodities to die for in order to obtain a fair-share of campus self-esteem in India in those days. Months later, Rohan, back from home after vacation was donning his newly acquired goodies everywhere. Until one of the other chaps noticed that he was actually wearing Roebeck shoes and Live Strauss Jeans. Our dark side as they say had taken over and we had given Rohan a torrid time and made him the subject of many laughs. Today, around 13 years later, it was Rohan’s turn to laugh right back. I made a note to let him know of this by email. Or maybe not…


In any case, after a bit of sign language with a friendly Chinese sales lady, I procured the sweater for 198 Yuan. Not too bad, I thought. The rest of the evening was spent devouring a buffet dinner at the hotel and some tepid conversation with the two large Dutchmen and the two small Chinamen.
The next morning, we took the car and drove about an hour to the Dachang province, which was a less prosperous part of town, though still looked much nicer a neighborhood than the typical medieval-inspired crowded-dusty-colony look that can be seen all over industrial India from Coimbatore to Faridabad. It was even colder this morning, certainly a few degrees below zero. We were ushered into a large comfortable conference room by our hosts, the Nanjing Chemical Machinery Company, a subsidiary of a large national oil company called Sinopec. What was notable here was that no one spoke a syllable of English, not even the Director, you know, the big boss. They had a sales engineer, a perky Chinese lady, who spoke some English. She was trying to translate. Ofcourse, we had Bin Wang on our end helping us with the same. But never have I seen so little communication amongst such a large body of humans, in spite of considerable effort. I could tell it was going to be a long day.
During the Plant Tour, we came across the workshop where they had set up the manufacturing of the really heavy-walled pressure vessels. These were big boys, about 5 metres in diameter, 5-10 in length but more importantly several tens of centimeters in wall-thickness. My colleague Heng Lee pointed out to me that this shop had this really cool welding technology which enabled them to weld extremely thick plates together without the standard beveled end and the large amount of weld deposit, and a large heat affected zone. He called it the Nano Gap Welding technique. I saw how it was done, it was really impressive. It seemed like very little separation was necessary between the plates. Perhaps that’s why it was called Nano Gap, I thought. Maybe it is capable of welding ends with high depths but with a gap in the nanometre range. I started using the term liberally for the rest of the day promising myself to look up google later to read up more on this really nanotech-inspired ultra modern technique. To my surprise, I could not find this term anywhere on the internet. Then suddenly the epiphany dawned upon me. Heng Lee obviously meant Narrow Gap Welding. Nothing Nanotech about that. Just an innocuous Chinese-accent moment. Ofcourse, if I had started mouthing off such drivel to the wider world, it may easily have caused an international incident.
I laughed hard, mostly at myself, and got into the car, preparing for a long drive to Wuxi, another industrial stronghold west of Shanghai.

The highway was formulaic, standard three lanes each way, with bilingual signage and elaborate serpentine exits, which from up above look like long-tailed Jalebis. The formula was a closely guarded secret during the second world war, held by design, by none other than Adolf Hitler himself. The Autobahn’s much more modern cousin was the US freeway system, introduced under the leadership of Dwight Eisenhower, one of the post-war US presidents. I can only surmise that there was not an official transfer of technology between the US and Germany for this to have happened. More likely is the eventuality that the Americans poached some smart Jewish civil engineers from West Germany with a promise of a better life. Ofcourse in today’s world, transfer of knowledge is not subservient to transfer of bodies. Hence, China could have constructed its highways fairly easily.

As the six –seater coasted, it reminded me of long drives in the US. The radio was turned off, and the air-conditioning wasn’t working, but apart from that the road was straight and long and the landscape was sparse and flat. Occasionally, one could see the some concrete dwellings standing by the highway purely by themselves. This arose my curiosity, as I did not see any other habitation around what was obviously living quarters for 30 odd families. I asked Bin Wang, what the deal was. He replied that there used to be a town, but that was before the highway went over it, and the buildings we saw were on their way to being demolished as well. The locals had been relocated to another town 45 miles away. I pondered at the ease with which China had arrived in the modern economic world. I also reflected on what had framed my idea of China before actually arriving here.

In some respects, I felt like Huen-Tsang or Fa-Hien, the two Chinese gents that I had been the most familiar with growing up. History was never one of my favourite subjects, but years of learning by rote had roused a little curiosity about the medieval age in India. Especially since these were the golden days of our country, where our population, unlike now, was probably under control, there was wealth, art, culture, civic liberties, justice and strong but benign monarchies. In actual fact, a large portion of my notion of the “Golden Age of the Gupta Empire” was framed by the diaries of the above-mentioned Chinese travelers. In the true spirit of Yin and Yang, these two had conflicting experiences in India over slightly different time-spans. Fa-Hien seemed to be robbed on the highway everytime, he stepped out of his palanquin for some green tea, while Huen-Tsang had it really good. He was wined and dined by Harsha Vardhana and his Indian jaunt more resembled a trip to Hawaii.

The history text by DN Kundra had a picture of these guys as well. They wore a long gowns tied at the waist, emblazoned with dragon-figures. They wore pigtails and had long mustachios as well. A similar portrait was also painted by Herge in “Tintin and the Blue Lotus”, which I also read about the same time. These two sources of information constituted my idea of the medieval Chinaman.

A cursory look at Heng Lee, seated next to me in a Nike sports jacket and gym shoes, soon brought back to the present. The car pulled into Wuxi City, and unfortunately this coincided with office time. The road to our hotel seemed to be eternal, and there was motor traffic everywhere. There were some bicycles too. But what was striking was that the roads were all “pukka” and there were no stray cattle. We passed the main artery, which was like any large Indian city, with a lot of retail shops with neon signs, mostly in Chinese, except for the double-arch of a McDonalds or the avuncular countenance of Colonel Sanders outside a KFC. In all the towns I visited, these two chains were omnipresent. Shanghai had all the chains, which is to be expected, since there is very little that is Chinese about that city.

The Hotel we checked into was a private label. It wasn’t bad, except for a pervading odour of oyster sauce in the lobby and a bit in the rooms as well. When Huen-Tsang stayed at the inns in India, he must be fighting Garam Masala to get any sleep

We were met for dinner at our lobby by two very young Chinese men. Initially, I had thought they were the appointed chaperones, but I soon realized that the younger of the two was actually the owner of the factory that we were here to see. He was all of 28 years old, educated in Canada and spoke very reasonable English. He also drove a scintillating Porsche and was dressed in designer labels. So much for great warriors with pigtails and mustachios. The dinner was a lavish affair, which by now I had come to expect. In Chinese culture, running short of food for a guest is an affront punishable by eternal ignominy, so the tendency to over-compensate was rampant. I had a sea-cucumber dish, which was a first for me. It didn’t look very appetizing and my young Chinese host reiterated this observation. However, wild as I was, I dug in and found it to be fairly agreeable. A bit of a jelly-like consistency in the mouth with a balance of soy sauce and ginger. I bet a lot of Chinese food tastes like this, to the point that the main protein could be absolutely anything and it would be impossible to know for sure. But what the heck, it did taste quite good and that’s all that mattered.

By the time dinner was over, I was too full to move and I crawled into bed awaiting another intense day at work in a foreign land with other other foreigners. I was homesick already, I couldn’t wait to get back to Changi, that elegant nest which lures the weary traveler back home with its aroma of smelly Bee-Hoon, its clinical efficiency and the whiff of balmy air the moment you exit the airport building.