For about three weeks in September, I hitchhiked through northeastern China. I am Chinese American, yet on this trip I met with people from an entirely different world.
My first stop was outside Harbin. At a gas station I was picked up by a salesman on his way to meet a client. He taught me how to “pitch” myself as a hitchhiker, and by the time he dropped me off, I was ready to go.
Near Tongliao, I was at a rest stop when five large buses pulled in and unloaded passengers. These tanned, older men and women were on the way to harvest potatoes in Weichang, in the direction I was going. I got on. After a few hours, we all stopped for noodles in a silent, smoke-filled canteen. Outside, one friendly man and I started chatting.
“Do you enjoy your job?” I asked. His smile vanished. He shook his head and walked off quickly.
Throughout my travels, asking “Do you enjoy your job?” proved to be a controversial question. When I asked a fisherman the question, “Do you hope your son becomes a fisherman too?” he angrily shook his head and left, just as the farmer did. Even when I asked my cousin, a banker with flexible hours, “Do you enjoy your job?” he simply said, “Work is work. I don’t enjoy or hate it. One day might be good, one day might be bad.” I got similar responses from cooks at restaurants, grocers and even a longtime bartender. I’m well aware that most Americans hate their jobs as well, yet the indifference coming from every single person I met certainly signals a cultural difference.
The reason could come from centuries of poverty and hardship. From 1958 to 1962, Chinese society underwent an industrialization campaign called the Great Leap Forward. On collective farms, peasants endured unrealistic production quotas, long hours, famine and poor infrastructure. It’s easy to see how generational poverty has led many Chinese to simply chase money. It’s even easier to see how this work ethic, over the past few decades, has caused China to surge to the modern nation it is today. The potato farmers, however, hadn’t yet caught that wave.
The bus stopped on the roadside for the night. Everyone got out to chain-smoke. We tried to sleep in our seats. In the morning, I was dropped off at my destination, exhausted.
Towards the beginning of the bus ride, the man sitting next to me wanted to chat. “America has occupied countries all over the world,” he began angrily. “Can’t everyone buy guns there? Don’t a certain group of people cause violence all the time?” He insisted China was better. “Our economy is the largest in the world now. If we have a war, we will easily beat you.”
Listening to him talk about his country reminded me of how many rural Americans talk about theirs. We really are all the same. I even agreed with certain points. He was wearing a Los Angeles Dodgers hat, which I explained was a baseball team from America. By the time we stopped for dinner, the mood had become friendly.
Throughout my journey, a few conversational themes kept coming up. Guns were a big one, as was violence in large cities. The bartender in Hohhot was a big fan of Trump; he said he admired his “America first” attitude. A truck driver in Guizhou told me, “We Chinese don’t hate America. We don’t have anything against any country, except Japan. If you were Japanese, I wouldn’t have picked you up.”
Chinese people love China. The truck driver told me how his small town’s infrastructure had vastly improved since he was born. I heard the same thing from factory employees at my family’s firm in Beijing, who preferred this work to the farming they used to do. After spending time with my extended family in Shenyang, Nanjing and Chongqing, I can attest that the stores are full of fresh food, cities are clean, subways are fast and life is good.
Back in August, I went on a guided tour of Tibet. The history between Tibet and the rest of China is exceedingly complicated, and our tour guide, Norbe, refused to talk politics. Three months later, I was sitting in a hostel lobby in Vietnam when Norbe walked in to check in. “Karma has brought me here to see you!” he said. We caught up over dinner, and I asked him what he really thought politically now that he wasn’t working. He told me he genuinely thought Tibet was better off as part of China. When I brought up the fact that the Chinese government was choosing a new Dalai Lama, he said that while it was a bad thing, it was a small issue. Like others I met, he emphasized the higher quality of life. “You see Nepal, how poor they are? If Tibet were independent, it would be a disaster.”
The U.S. likewise has a long list of issues. The more people I talk to, the harder it is to defend what makes my country great. Yet I instinctively know it is. Such is the way when talking to Chinese people. In China, there is nearly no negative news on TV or online. Likewise, none of them see the documentaries or testimonials on Chinese minority detentions that we see in the West. The main difference is that in America, everyone knows about the violence, detentions and other issues, and we debate them openly. If Chinese people had total knowledge of their issues, as Americans do, would they still love their country just as much? Judging by how many Americans thrive despite the U.S.’s problems, I’d say they would.
Most people who gave me rides had never met a foreigner before. Watching them turn from hesitant to happy is part of what makes hitchhiking so great. In Hebei, I was picked up by a farmer riding with his wife and baby boy.
“Come, I’ll take you to Datan!” he said, smiling widely. He farmed chilli peppers and was taking his crop to market. He asked me about my dreams. I said I’d like to be an engineer, though farming seemed like a good life. He agreed, though he said “You always want what the other person has.” When I asked him what his dream was, he said he just wanted his son to have a better life. When I asked if he liked his job, he said as long as his family was cared for, he loved it. As the sun set, the road climbed from the forest to the steppe. In my 20 or so rides across China, he was the only person who believed in ‘dreams.’ In Datan, he and his family grinned and waved as they drove away. With people like him, China will be all right.
It’s hard to take news at face value, and I have certainly been struggling to piece together a complete idea of China after spending time there. Experience is the only thing that can give you the truth. If anything, I hope you get out there and see for yourself.
