Fuquin isn’t on the tourist trail.. even the locals will tell you, there ain’t much to see.. now I will say that in my 6 hours wandering around Fuquin, I did find some things I enjoyed, I can’t lie, but it’s off the tourist trail for a reason.. 90% of the town is about 10 years old, and the surroundings are farm land, not much nature left except on a few hill tops, no beaches that I have been able to discern, just some estuary and islands, one amazing old temple that the locals disregard and use as a card room, but then this remarkable urban testimony to the new China. The last time I was in China, about 6 years ago, I got as far as I could from the Han Chinese as almost possible. I went as quickly as I could by train away from the ‘economic success stories’ on the coast, and buried myself in the indigenous cultures, mountains and river valleys of Yunnan and southern Sichuan, which was basically unchanged since the cultural revolution excepting a few tourist and mining towns I hit, outside of Kunming, which I dubbed the Chinese Denver, which was hard to not see as an Economic powerhouse. On that trip, I had avoided what I saw today, traveling by motorcycle into the recesses, which was the Han thing, 800 million strong, the New China thing, the success that people talk about that makes my eyes glaze over while I think of all that cool Chinese character being bulldozed into a shopping mall, Hutong Land. When people get excited about it, New China, I make a mental note to not be curious about them anymore. I smell MBA indoctrination and some secret Bougie fantasies. But here I was today, my decision on where to roam decided by a ship schedule, confronted by it.. I will say that the old China is more than there, it’s not just in the cracks, it’s still on main street. In downtown Fuquin, which the ship agent who gave me a ride there and shared lunch with me called a village, I found a small city, what felt like 20k 30k or so people, and putting the history together, the whole place was a fishing village until they built this port and free trade zone ten years ago. I still had a funny time watching an old guy pull his goat through the main intersection of town, it fighting him with all it’s might, him leaning back on the rope, still something timeless occurring, and I even gave it a tap on the haunches to help him out. But the other thing is going on too..
When I woke up and looked out at the port, it felt new, it looked new, and the agent, a kid named Antonio, which was westernized from the Mandarin word for East, confirmed I was right, ten years old and built on landfill.. he said there wasn’t much in town, and even the crew, who had to work all day anyways, told me it was a ghost town and to wait until Xiamen tomorrow to go ashore.. I wasn’t gonna sit around after 17 days on the ship (not that I was complaining, but I wanted to smell green, see trees, eat something not fried) so Antonio offered to take me in, the only drawback that I had to wait through his two phones ringing off the hook to get through conversations in his passable English, which was his college major. He had about 3 big ships a week to handle, plus what he called a feeder ship coming down the rivers or from Taiwan every day or more. He taught me a lot, and I saw a lot.. He is from Fuzhou, the provincial capital, about 2 hours away, and he said he could barely understand the locals here. But I could tell pretty quickly the locals had been marginalized by a new China, and this was an Industry town. After he took me to Immigrations to get my Visa validated, which for some reason took 20+ minutes even though I was the only customer in this massive office, he took me to town. They had created a special visa system just for Americans as part of this bullshit reciprocity thing that all these countries had started after September 11, but at least they didn’t take the humiliating step of finger printing me like some do. Anyhow, Antonio drove the company car to town, which he claimed was 20 minutes away, and that there were no taxis. This turned out to not be completely true. It took 20 minutes because he never once used his gas pedal, I actually looked, 15 kph the whole way, for safety he said.. he just put the car in drive and let the torque of the engine idling take us there.. it must have been 3 kilometers away. In fact, the whole island is only 10km long they told me, maybe 10 miles, now more a peninsula joined by both a bridge and a land fill bit they recently did, and the town sits on the south side. The downtown area is called “shady side fuqin” if I heard it right, for the shady side of the little river that runs though it. After hitting an ATM and finding an upstairs restaurant with some impressive service (they all had radio earpieces like some ultra club, but I was calmed by being able to see out a crack in the wall, no, not a window, just a gap they forgot to fill above the pisser, next to a fully functioning window, and I was able to see a sewer and a goose wandering around in a dirty back yard, which brought me back comfortably to the old China again.) for a huge bowl of seafood and Sichuan peppers that we ladled out into these tiny bowls. Antonio spit his bones out in true Chinese form, while I am sure I did something equally deemed offensive to the Chinese. Then we wandered back to his car, through farmland and a few jaunts to satisfy my curiosity, finding an old temple back in an Alley that was impressive as hell, with endless amazing colorful and gilded carvings, but with a poker game going on, and the level of restoration one might find in an old kitchen, with catalogues stacked upon them, museum quality art works, and LED lights nailed into corners and tape and glass stuck here and there. The place was awesome, and given all the reverence of a cement community center in a Great Society housing project, which I delighted in.
The town shares bottom land with the river and rises on some hills, and you can walk down an alleyway and pop into some intensively cultivated land on the banks of the river, where you would expect buildings anywhere else, just feet off the main drags, but did I mention buildings? Here is what I have been avoiding. So ten years ago they build this container port to export from Fuzhao and a few of it’s more interior provinces, and this little village becomes a boom town, and the thing impossible not to notice where these huge town house looking things, with every weird example of run together european and chinese architectural flourish, so that the whole place looked like a vertical version of a Dallas suburb sprinkled on rural Asia, or like someone took Amsterdam, carved the houses from each other, and scattered them one by one over the land randomly, with these gaudy but oddly appealing chateaus next to pig farms and lettuce plots. It ran like that for miles, with these 4 or 5 story high palatial looking apartment buildings squeezed in on these little plots, sometimes with just a dirt track leading to them. It was all so odd, so Chinese-ly odd. Context matters not after the Cultural revolution.. if the market will sustain it, build away. So the other shock was the other part of main street. Now the old china, like I said, still there.. fruit sellers and foul smells, market garbage like piles of fruit scraps and semi open sewers mixed, with noodle joints, and turtles for sale, but the part I didn’t expect? Boutiques, and the Suburban Mo’s. I got it in my head that it’s 1962 in China.. it’s conservatively sexy, the women look, well, strangely hot, and this town has a raft of married non working mom’s with cash to burn and long days to fill, likely because the harbor and nearby chemical plant pays to sustain that. I was just kind of shocked. There were endless wine shops, boutique tea stores, and homeware stores.. but not the cheap hardware stores I learned to love in Yunnan.. we aren’t talking Rodeo drive, but it was a hell of a lot closer than I expected, rain shower heads and solar hot water heaters.. and the women, with a distinct style, attractive, lot’s of wool, like a chic version of england in the 60’s, again with the crazy platform heels with tassels and fur and frills, and I was amazed at the difference in nutrition that either the one child policy, now 30 years old, or the industrialization had created, because these housewives were amazons compared to the older people you could see who had survived the Cultural Revolution and concurrent famines of those upheavals. They were tall, attractive, and fashionable decked out. It hit home most in a supermarket I found upstairs from main street. I think the fancy thing in China is to put things upstairs.. the shit you want is never at street level when it comes to food, at least so the pretension implies. I figure out that this staircase leads to a supermarket, and head upstairs. I pass a sign that says in English, to my distinct satisfaction, “High Quality Consumption Environment” and other such lines that are that kind of no beating around the bush when it comes to greed chinese language direct translations. Another I think said something like “Parking Trouble Free Shopping Experience”. It was a bit like a Whole Foods in America, in that there were actually satisfying things to see and explore, dried fish boxes of many varieties next to a handful of vegetable matters I had never quite seen before, things you expected from an outdoor market with shanks of beef hanging, bullfrogs for sale, and people spitting between the stalls, but I the setting of a western market, but it was the clientelle that hit me.. more of these hottie pottotie amazonian chinese housewives in 6 inch heels, and mostly unpretentious, all kind of ready to say hi. At one point I thought maybe one of them had pinched my butt and was looking for a little flirtation, but I figured out it was her bag, but it had that feel, a bit of Orange County, a bit of Camelot innocence with a bit of tongue in cheek randiness, don’t let the hair band fool you, Binky-san likes to party. The country couldn’t forget what it was, it was all over the streets, it still felt honest, just modern. I rue two generations from now, but this was hard to not on some level see as pleasant, maybe suburban, maybe the precedent for something horrible, Chinese Edward Scissorhands being born as I write, no doubt not nature based, not reverent, but I was suckered just long enough but the oxygen pumped breezes of the High Quality Consumption Environment simply by virtue of my not having thought in my brain of brains that china could pull it off quite so convincingly. Latin America can’t.. they hustle and they bustle, but the anxiety is always there.. same with India I imagine.. it just comes across as at odds with the gestalt, but here it was.. the new China, and I was half pleased it might have just pinched my ass..