Bars are a little crazier in the south of China where there is new wealth. Young people demand nice places to eat and drink. By 2015, the number of Chinese adults under 30 is expected to swell 61%, to 500 million, equivalent to the entire population of the European Union. This night was Nicole’s 26th birthday so we all went out to a nightclub— The Yes Club in Guangzhou. Nicole was the first person in China I met after being absent for 17 years. She was a PR employee who was just eight years old the last time I visited her country. Her parents, along with 300 million other Chinese, were part of the largest human migration ever when they were finally allowed to leave their rural collective farms and enter the cities. They did it so that eventually, their child would have a better chance for an education and a good job. Nicole is now among the first generation in China to use credit cards. Her weekly salary is greater than both of her parents’ monthly collective-era pensions. I tried to explain the China I witnessed 17 years ago to Nicole and told her many different stories during one drive to the ocean town of Zhapo. None of my stories were remotely believable to her—it was not her China. Before the drive we had been walking through a huge, gleaming mall in Guangzhou with boutiques for Louis Vuitton and Dolce and Gabana so I told her about going into the best department store I could find 17 years ago that was segregated for foreigners and was the only place you could find nicer “brands.” I told her there was a photo on the wall behind the cash register and underneath it were the words: “worst employee of the month.” In communist China, everyone was guaranteed a job and the only way to get employees to work better was to shame them. I told her about the legions of street sweepers (more guaranteed jobs) that just moved the dust one street over to the next legion of street sweepers. I told her about the leap of faith you had to take to cross a river of bicycles in Beijing. You had to step into the flow and wait for the bikes to go around you and then take another step, wait, and then another step. I told her this story when we were in a traffic jam of automobiles in Guangzhou. Of all the stories I told her, she only recognized one from her experience in China. The story was about trying to make a phone call from Wuhan to Melissa, my wife, back home in the U.S. The operator at the Wuhan Iron and Steel Guest House #4 told me to go to my dirty little room and wait while she called all the operators to set it up. Then I listened on the phone as I was patched one operator at a time all the way to the trunk line in Beijing. When the signal finally got to America, our home phone was busy and we didn’t have call waiting so I never did get through to my wife. But Nicole recognized that this was at least a true story because when she was very young, she sat on her aunt’s knee in the telephone office as her aunt patched through telephone calls. Now Nicole just types a prefix into her cell phone to get a VOIP line to make cheap international calls.
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