Thousand Island Lake, The Milan-Seine Hotel, and My First Encounter With Chinese Law Enforcement
My post at Ouyang Yu Middle School in Hunan province doesn’t start until August 15th, but our training in Chiang Mai, Thailand began on May 30th and ended June 11th. I was invited to tag along and help out with a program called AYLP (American Youth Leadership Program). AYLP is a collaboration between VIA and the State Department. With Brooke and Seigi fearlessly leading, we China fellows and three awesome adult mentors helped escort an intrepid contingent of Bay Area high school students around Guangzhou and Hong Kong with the aim of learning about environmental practices, problems, and solutions in these areas.
We toured Hong Kong’s power plant, the American consulates in both cites, and several NGOs including Bike Green, Conservation International, Clean The World, Plastic Free Seas, and others. We even had time for KTV on the last night. The kids were amazing, their enthusiasm and intelligence humbling, and their curiosity inspiring. It was also exhausting. I have a newfound respect for Brooke and Seigi for being able to handle the enormous responsibilities that come with the roles they play in these endeavors.
AYLP kept me occupied until July 7th, and I elected to stay (on my mother’s dime, thanks momma) in Asia for the remainder of my pre-Hunan time. I’m now travelling west, to places in China where things are cheaper, foreigners are fewer, and trains are slower.
After a week spent in Shanghai, sleeping on the couch and testing the limits of Juanito a.k.a. Francisco, Giorgio, and Gatito’s apparently infinite hospitality, I find myself now in a kooky little town called Jiande (建德). Jiande is a quaint hamlet of 510,000 people on the outskirts of Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province. A river called Xinan flows along its southern border. The source of the river is an enormous, man-made lake called Qiandaohu(千岛湖 ) which means “Thousand Island Lake” (no relation to the salad dressing). Qiandao lake was created in the late 1950s after the construction of the Xinan River Hydroelectric Dam, about two miles upstream from where I’m now sitting. The flooding that ensued submerged an ancient town that was recently “rediscovered” by international archaeologists and photographers and created an enormous reservoir studded with over 1,000 islands and islets.
Qiandao lake is also notably the bottling site of the legendary Nongfu Spring (农夫山泉) water. Nongfu Spring is the “least contaminated” bottled water to be had in China, a country rife with water pollution, shortages, and other crises. A research paper* I wrote in university led me to learning about Qiandao Lake and part of the reason I came here was to see firsthand where the water that I’ve come to know and love so well comes from.
However, in deciding where to stay I made what, in hindsight, now seems a somewhat obvious blunder: I zoomed out too far on Google Maps and grossly underestimated the distance from The Milan Seine — the crummy hotel I booked on a whim — to the actual fun or interesting parts of the lake. I thought it would be easy to just hike or take a bus over to some sunny lakeside beach and take a dip. Instead, I have to take a local bus to the county transit hub, produce my passport to buy a regional bus ticket, and wait about 40 minutes for one of the shuttle buses to take me to the county of Chuan’an (淳安), a 30-minute drive away. Also, the buses stop at five, so if I don’t make it to the Chuan’an county transit center by then I’m up the creek (no pun intended) as far as coming back to this veritable oasis of a hotel is concerned.
At about 9 o’clock this morning I heard what I thought was the maid at my door. “现在不用!” “Not now!” I grumbled, half asleep. They yelled something back. Bleary eyed I began to get out of bed. “Not now!” I said again.
“警察采访！ 请配合一下!”
I understood this time: “Police interview! Please cooperate!”
“Police interview?” I asked.
“Yes!” They said.
Hastily buttoning on a shirt I stumbled to the door and opened it up and sure enough, there were two young police officers**. They looked younger than I am, maybe 20 or 22, but it’s hard to say. The one on the left smiled disarmingly and met my eye contact. He was a handsome guy in a sort of non-descript way, smooth, clear skin, black hair, nothing exactly striking but nothing exactly ugly about him either. Without a uniform he would have been completely anonymous. I don’t remember what the guy on the right looked like at all.
I apologized for not understanding them. They said no worries, they just needed to, according to Chinese law, make sure that my travel documents were in order and that the hotel had registered me properly. I fumbled around looking for my passport for a few minutes that felt like hours before realizing that my passport was in my pocket. I handed it over to the guy.
“你们这样很正常吗？” I asked. “Is this normal?” He said yeah, it is, and that with the G20 conference happening soon in Hangzhou — he specifically mentioned that Obama would be there — security was tightening and that their sweep of the hotel was part of that. He asked where my last entry-date stamp was and was visibly surprised when he found that my visa allows for multiple entries of up to 60 days at a time.
Tomorrow I’ll take a boat from Qiandao Lake to Huangshan (黄山), which is almost certainly a more popular tourist destination than Jiande.
Notes:
*If you do read this beware you’ll come across my recycled jokes.
**It’s worth noting there that there are many different types and kinds of police in China. Baidu Baike, China’s Wikipedia, lists 13. Put simply, they range from Chengguan （城管） to Wujing (武警）. The Chengguan carry batons and are basically like armed health-inspectors or meter maids. Their work seems to consist entirely of scattering people who are selling stuff on the street only to have them come back minutes after they leave in an endless, Sisyphean cycle that occasionally escalates into physical violence but is usually kind of a joke. The Wujing are comprised in large part by former soldiers and serve essentially as riot police and are charged with enforcing public security on a wholesale level. The two lads that came to my door this morning I think were Gongan (公安), public security officers who generally don’t carry guns, and who exist somewhere between those two extremes.
