The Land of Make Believe

Originally written January 2012 • Uploaded to Facebook on Jan 12, 2012, 9:29 AM

It is entirely true that China is a land of wonders—a place where your imagination can run free and where your money stretches so far that you struggle to imagine going back home, where you'll inevitably miss the massive purchasing power most expats enjoy here. As a foreigner in China, you quickly learn to love the simple daily mechanics that make it a great place to live: the food, the incredibly cheap transportation, the historic sights, and sometimes the unique sounds.

Living here can occasionally become deeply tiresome, even nudging you toward a slow sort of insanity. But if you learn to be simultaneously peaceful and ingenious, that adaptive edge keeps you sane. Still, we always find ourselves looking for things to keep us grounded—small anchors that remind us of home or the comforts we miss most. In my case, it’s Froot Loops.

Sometimes you get a lucky break. You stumble into an obscure item that has always brought a genuine smile to your face, like Vegemite for Australians or A1 sauce for Americans. We praise God when a shop randomly stocks an obscure foreign brand seeking a foothold in the Chinese market, and we feel a quiet tragedy when their efforts go unrewarded and the stock disappears. There are days when you feel like you've struck a gold mine, uncovering products you forgot even existed outside of your childhood dreams. Often, these items were long ago banned in our homelands due to astronomical sugar content or dubious chemical ingredients, yet somehow they bypass international regulations and make it to China safe, sound, and incredibly cheap.

On the flip side, some things remain stubbornly elusive, never quite making their way across the border. We resort to making them ourselves, adapting primitive methods to concoct everything from classic brownies and fresh hummus to the occasional block of cheese. Sometimes we succeed, and sometimes we fail miserably, leaving us wondering when we'll be lucky enough to just have those simple items imported nearby. Of course, this isn't quite the case for people living in major hubs like Beijing or Shanghai; the expat populations there are vast enough to sustain dedicated markets for instant baking mixes and high-quality craft beer. But for those of us residing in the smaller, interior cities, we wait and wait.

And yet, a local entrepreneur will occasionally surprise you by churning out a Western product you love. In Harbin, owing to decades of Russian influence, you can find pickles and sausages in almost every corner store. In Xi'an, there is a bakery close to my house that makes the absolute best chocolate moon pies. Sometimes I can buy excellent imported German beer at a massive discount simply because the local clientele doesn't care for the taste or can't justify the price.

Everything feels victorious in those moments of discovery—you feel a sudden bond, thinking you can share these tastes and preferences with the local community. Then, you take a bite. That jar of pickles glistening on your counter, conjuring nostalgic mental images of Jewish delis and grandmothers with a lust for garlic, turns to ash the moment your teeth sink in. It tastes of paint thinner, sour lemons, and old age. Or take the fantastically cheap beer selling for forty-five cents per three-quarter liter; it leaves you with a catastrophic hangover, prompting your friends to point out that the formaldehyde content is likely higher than the actual alcohol. The Guinness we occasionally track down tastes more like vinegar than stout.

Don't even get me started on the seasonal sausages that appear in the weeks leading up to Spring Festival. They look identical to the brats and links that bring genuine joy to backyard grillers and their starving families. Tossing one of those puppies onto a hot grill delivers an immediate reality check. What you thought was savory meat reveals itself to taste something closer to perfumed soap remnants.

Food isn't the only arena where you find yourself simultaneously miraged and swindled. Harbin hosts the magnificent annual Ice Festival, featuring colossal, beautiful ice sculptures that glow vividly at night and dazzle the eyes. But the reality behind the curtain can be a little jarring. The towering blocks of ice are manufactured in specialized factories because the water in the local river is far too polluted to use naturally. Furthermore, the steep admission fee—frequently over fifty dollars—effectively bars all but the wealthiest residents from ever stepping foot inside to see the monuments. From the locals I spoke with, the entire Ice Festival is an insulated fantasy reserved strictly for outside tourists. There is always more than meets the eye if you scratch beneath the surface.

But we don't like to scratch the surface too often, because we are quietly terrified of what we might find. The cheap goods we buy and the low rents we enjoy exist precariously. The consumer products are fundamentally engineered to fail after a brief window, and the high-rises stand largely because God is great. You see countess buildings that are only a few years old yet already look entirely decrepit, actively falling to pieces from the inside out. A hyper-bustling economy that churns out millions of units a day rarely has the luxury of pairing quality with quantity.

Yet, we all willingly allow ourselves to be fooled. Take a bicycle I recently bought: a brand-new mountain bike for $120, loaded with upfront bells and whistles like front suspension and dual disc brakes. I walked away thinking I had pulled off a massive bargain. Within a few days, the brakes began emitting a horrific squeal and the front shocks started leaking a consistent streak of oil. When I went back to complain to the vendor, he assured me the noise was perfectly normal and that the fluid line was just grease migrating from the springs inside. I had assumed they were high-end oil-dampened shocks; it turned out they were just cheap metal springs hidden inside a hollow plastic casing. Things are always hiding from view.

Just yesterday, I climbed into a cable car to cross the frozen river here in Harbin in sub-zero weather. The designated slot where a space heater should have been sat entirely empty, and the glass windows wouldn't close all the way. A pleasant, scenic sightseeing adventure instantly transformed into a ride inside a high-altitude icebox, offering a very real chance of being cryogenically frozen if you were foolish enough to purchase a return ticket.

Ultimately, our food, our drinks, and our surroundings are frequently miles away from what they seem. They appear modern, sleek, and stylish on the surface—and they are undeniably cheaper than back home—but they are only cheap because they answer to no regulatory authority, no strict craftsmanship, and follow only the singular goal of mass production. When a local merchant told me I could buy a replica iPhone for around fifty dollars, I was stunned by the prospect of owning such a coveted device for pennies. But as the old adage goes, you get exactly what you pay for. Many of those counterfeit phones essentially self-destruct like messages in *Mission: Impossible*. The ones that don't operate so slowly and unresponsively that it feels like carrying an upside-down turtle in your pocket—an object with the theoretical potential to move, but one that just flaps its limbs endlessly to no end.

Locating myself here has undeniably made me a little wiser and a lot more cautious about where I deploy my money. Yet, the moment I spot a random jar of pickles on a shelf, completely suckered by its implicit promise of garlic breath and crisp delight, I can't help myself. I whip out my cash and say yes all over again. Maybe next time I’ll have the discipline to ask myself if I’m paying for the dream or the heartbreak.