|
Home>News Center>Life | |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
Yesterday's yuppies Bohemia
Trying to contact Zhuang Jian is a difficult mission. He lives in Dali, a town in Southwest China's Yunnan Province. But he seems to appear everywhere - one friend saw him several months ago in Kathmandu and then a Chinese pop music critic mentioned he met him at a bar in Hangzhou, the capital of East China's Zhejiang Province. His mobile phone rings on and on into infinity, or is often out of credit, or is wrong. Fortunately, he has not changed his e-mail address. So after dropping him a line, he sent back his new mobile phone number. When he picked up the phone in the third week of September, he was in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, eating hotpot with his friends. It was near the Mid-Autumn Festival (15th day of the 8th Chinese lunar month), and he had returned home to visits his parents there. To many of us Chinese who stick in one place to follow a career, Zhuang seems to be a man idling away his life. However, to himself and his peers, he is just one of the country's increasing number of restless urban nomads. Different from millions of migrating rural labourers who move to cities for better jobs, Zhuang and others are moving from big cities to small towns and even the countryside in search of fine weather, good scenery, trusted friends and more freedom. These can be found, they say, by living at the edge of society. "I just try to find a place I truly like to live, though it is kind of time-consuming." This is true. He has spent 10 years trying to find a place in which to settle. Big lights, empty dreams Like many urban Chinese aged over 35, Zhuang, 36, was born in a city, educated and landed his first job in the same city. He graduated from Sichuan University, the top college in the region, in 1989, with a degree in international trade - a sought after major by employees at that time. He got a job with a big local trade company and enjoyed pretty good pay. Living in an apartment that his parents had found for him, he could have found a local girlfriend, married her, had a child and lived a stable family life like many of his local friends. But he quit the job after three years and decided to move to Shenzhen, the country's most dynamic and open coastal city at that time - a mecca to many restless young Chinese. "The life in Chengdu was slow and easy," he says. "I wanted a faster pace, exciting nightlife and more money." He got them all in the young city, which was once a fishing village of 20,000 people before it became a special economic zone following China's opening-up reform. Working with a company engaged in export trade, he notched up bank savings of over 400,000 yuan (US$48,000), a big sum of money, within three years. "I was certainly white-collar and quite pleased with myself," he says, laughing in the phone. Stepping out In the spring of 1996, an earthquake measuring over 7 on the Richter scale rocked the Lijiang area in the northwestern part of Yunnan Province. While much of newer Lijiang was levelled, the old-style architecture of the remote town was largely unscathed. Lijiang started to become one of the country's most popular backpacking circuit towns. Later the United Nations placed Lijiang on the World Heritage Site list. Zhuang went to the small town for a two-week vacation in that spring, just after the earthquake. The trip changed his life forever. He fell in love with the town - a delightful maze of cobbled streets, rickety old wooden buildings, gushing canals and the hurly-burly of market life. "It was quiet and peaceful," he recalls, "and far from being a popular tourist destination." He stayed in a guesthouse, explored the town and its surrounding countryside and made friends with the locals. The vacation stretched to a month, three months - and eventually over a year. He returned to Shenzhen, quit his job, left the city for Lijiang and has not looked back. He rented a room in one of Lijiang's old houses, raised a grey hound, met his first foreign girlfriend and enjoyed his new life. "I found the life could be different," he says. "You don't need to bustle around to earn never-enough money, and pay that much for a comfortable life." Though living in Lijiang those days was much cheaper, he still found his personal bank account shrinking. He decided to "do something for a living." He opened a bar in the old town of Lijiang, which soon became "the best new option" recommended by Lonely Planet's "China" tourist book. In the popular guidebook, he is the owner who "was in fact reading Dostoyevsky in English." "I never did that, you know, I can hardly speak English," he says. "They must have the wrong person." But the business was good anyway. As foreign backpackers were always packed in the bar, he often earned over 10,000 yuan (US$1,200) a month. "That was a lot of money, as my rent for the bar was only several hundreds a month," he says. Along with the arrival of more and more backpackers and then package tourists, he began to lose his passion for the town. "More and more business people poured into the town and opened shops there," he says. "Tourists were everywhere. The night in the old town has become too clamourous." He spent more and more time exploring mountains hidden in western China. While earning money quickly, he spent it even faster. And as he did not pay much attention to his bar business, it went downhill. At the end of 1999, he sold half of his share of the bar to a bar owner in Dali and later another half - and moved to Dali. Located some 200 kilometres south of Lijiang, Dali is one of the country's most laid-back towns. With its stunning mountain backdrop, nearby Erhai Lake, and old city district, cappuccinos and pizzas, it has been a place where many foreign backpackers hang around long before the rising of Lijiang. "But it has never been as popular and hence crowded as Lijiang," Zhuang says. There he has many friends who he met during the years and often have the similar background with him. "Originally there were a dozen of guys moving to the town from big cities like me and now 50 or 60 more have joined us," he says. And he can easily meet interesting new friends there. They are painters, movie directors, writers and rock'n'roll singers who often come from such big cities as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou and stay in Dali for their summer and winter vacations. After talking with a friend of movie director, he has become interested in the field, making documentary with a camera-recorder. He went to a Tibetan monastery in Zhongdian, a county in northwestern Yunnan and recorded the daily life of a Tibetan monk. He travelled into the mountains straddling between Yunnan and the Tibet Autonomous Region and made a documentary about the local Tibetans' life in the bustling season of picking mushrooms. To maintain this expensive interest, he opened a bookstore on Dali in the spring of 2001, selling second-hand English books and coffee. It turned out to be a bad investment. Without stable supply of used English books, the bookstore was always losing out. "I had really hard time in 2001 and 2002 and sometimes had to live by borrowing," he recalls. He closed the bookstore at the end of 2002 and decided to leave Dali and return home. He says: "Chengdu is my hometown. I always like its food. After all these years, I thought I might be able to like its slow, chaotic but secular atmosphere." Dali recall Hiring a truck, he moved all of his belongings that he had collected over the years to Chengdu. With co-operation from a local friend, he opened a bar by the Jinjiang River which runs through the city. In the first three months, the business was good and then, suffered a drastic drop as the result of the SARS epidemic. He felt bored by the city's gloomy weather and "young bourgeois" again. Selling his share of the bar to the co-owner, he hired a truck and moved back to Dali before the epidemic was over. He decided to go abroad to "look for a better place to live." Nepal, India, the Laos, Thailand and Viet Nam. He failed to find such a place through the trips often spanning one or two months. But they are still rewarding, he says. At first, he found nowhere better than Dali. "I couldn't make interesting friends in those places as easy as here in Dali," he says. "It's not because of the language. It's because I couldn't read their faces at a glimpse and tell whether they are my type of people or not." Also he finds a way to support his travels and his lifestyle - collecting handicrafts in those countries and selling them in Dali. "It doesn't require much money, except you do need sharp eyes," Zhuang says. In August of last year, he opened a tiny handicraft shop in the old town of Dali, which "so far has been a success." So he can rent a farm house on the bank of the Erhai Lake and he says he is feeling settling down. "It is a two-storey building facing Erhai with a big courtyard," he says. "My friends and I can swim in the lake, enjoy sunshine in the day and watch stars and have the fullmoon parties at night. And at 700 yuan (US$84) a month, it's cheap."
"Man, it covers an area of 260 mu (over 17 hectares)," he says. "With such a place, you would never worry about disturbing your neighbours."
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Nowadays the restless man has a new project for sustaining his life in
Dali - to rent a tea garden on the nearby Cangshan Mountains and turn it into a
"commune for friends to spend holidays, hold painting exhibitions and even stage
concerts.
