Waiguoren run amok

It was pitch dark when we arrived. At 5:30 a.m. dawn hadn't yet begun to crack in Hefei, and the murky black added to our disorientation as we staggered out of the train station.

Gloria and I made the short journey to the capital of Anhui province hoping to get a glimpse of the China you rarely see from the uber-urban confines of Shanghai--the rural areas that, according to official Chinese government statistics, still house about 60 per cent of the country's population.

Of course, in China things don't really work like that. A huge number of the millions of people currently classified as "peasants" under China's demographic system are migrant workers, many of whom have moved numerous times to various better-developed urban areas where they can earn a much better living working in masochistic conditions for well under the official minimum wage. In doing this, they studiously ignore the hukou system designed precisely to keep them in the countryside, growing cheap produce to feed the industrial workforce. Lacking hukou, they aren't supposed to get any social services in the cities where they live, but an astounding feat of wilful blindness and double-think on the Party's part has given rise to a raft of parallel services--many of them government-sanctioned. Don't ask me why this makes sense.

The plurality of Shanghai's "floating population" hails from Anhui. We wanted to see what they were leaving behind.

We also didn't have any game plan whatsoever. Nor, we discovered as we staggered in drunken fatigue around the square outside the train station, could we buy a Pinyin-equipped map.

But like the good weiguoren we were, we agonized over the miniscule characters on our overpriced, Chinese-only city plan and wandered early-morning Hefei. The provincial capital, population 1.5 million, is a small city by Chinese standards. It's in the throes of a major residential construction boom, if the ubiquitous billboards promising a joyous, harmonious lifestyle to anyong who buys a luxury apartment are anything to go by. Hu Jintao's an Anhui native, and one of the perks of having the country's president hail from your province is the coincidental flood of infrastructure cash you get. Score.

But most of Hefei, if you avoid the KFC-laden downtown core, still feels like an intimate, small-scale municipality. We watched, and were sorely tempted to join, hundreds of people practicing Tai Chi and dancing in a big public park. Many of the apartment complexes we passed had community gardens or plants sprouting from tiny boxes on balconies or windowsills. We spent hours getting lost in the city's back alleys.

Accompanied by a trio of locals foolhardy enough to offer to show us around, we bused to a remote suburb that was once farmland and is now in some weird rural-urban twilight zone where spanking new apartment buildings abut small, single-family fields of peppers, cabbage and carrots. A gleaming college campus looms in the background. But there's still plenty of mud.

The next day we headed by to a small town chosen randomly on our Chinese-only map. We spent most of the bus ride entertaining a shocked and terrified toddler who kept peering at us, wide-eyed, over his dad's shoulder. Seriously, I need to start charging for this.

The road to Fengyang plows through tiny villages doused in fall leaves, passing low brick-and-concrete houses, tiny plots of land and yards hanging with Hello Kitty- and Kappa-emblazoned laundry. Fengyang itself resembles a weird cross between the wide boulevards and raw construction of a nineteenth-century North American frontier town and the sun-soaked, vine-laden back alleys of a tuscan village. But with a big, pagoda-topped gate on the old stone city wall, which is now smack in the middle of fast-food places and a store with a window full of shiny white sit-down toilets. I'm not entirely sure where the market is for that here.

The weiguoren may as well have dropped in from outer space. Everyone who saw us wore the same expression: "What the hell do you think you're doing here?" When we meandered out of town and into a series of fields of harvested bamboo--now blackened after the leftover stalks were burned, and cold in the evening chill--the people we ran into didn't seem to know whether to look suspicious or incredulous.

This was most hilarious when we tried to get something to eat. Famished, we stepped inside a place that looked like a restaurant (no, I still don't know the character for "restaurant," although I can read with alacrity such characters as "careful," "longevity noodles" and "apple that tastes like a banana").

"Um, 我们可以吃饭这里吗?"

Can we eat here?

Next thing we knew we were surrounded by shelves of vegetables and raw meat, clumsily trying to order before being ushered into a windowless white room that barely fit the single, huge round table it housed. We sat there smiling awkwardly, making heinous grammatical errors in an attempt at conversation as the proprietary family, plus neighbours who dropped in for a chat and some cha, gawped.

The food was delicious.