In the Danger Zone (34 page)

There's a set of steps at the back. Where do they go?' I ask, wondering if she has another room.

'They're for the family that lives upstairs,' she says, pointing to a platform that sits precariously above her room.

Other rooms have no light whatsoever, but one woman proudly shows me her TV and shrine inside her dingy black hole of a room. Some others have stereos and bicycles, although they are rare exceptions. But they have managed to move here and get jobs, they hold their heads high and they are relatively optimistic amidst the squalor.

I meet a young man called Ramprakash who arrived a year ago and survives by selling children's shoes that squeak with each step. His tiny shack is clean but extremely difficult to live in. I buy a pair of his shoes for my daughter Poppy, and have to practically fight him to accept the money. It comes as a shock to me that he rents his shack. Even in slums, you can't just build a house from wood and plastic sheeting – every scrap of land is owned by someone, and they will want to be paid for it. Ramprakash rents his shack from a dalit who has managed to escape the slums.

But amongst all this, I finally discover a real story of hope. Twelve million people in Bombay live in its various slums, trying to escape the cycle of poverty. One way of getting out is to become a dabbawallah. These men (always men) are tiffin-carriers – porters who take people's tins of packed lunch to work for them. Most middle-class Mumbaians want to eat homemade food in their office, but don't want to carry it on the crowded trains. It seems to be a snobbery thing – it's just not done to be seen to carry your own tiffin, and if you can afford to get someone else to do it, why not? If it sounds ridiculous, it is, but it's another way that wealth feeds down to the poor. For a small fee, they do the carrying for you, picking up the tiffin box from your wife after you've left home, and delivering it to your desk. They also pick up the old tin from yesterday's meal and it gets delivered back to your wife again before you get home. Most dabbawallahs never meet the person they deliver the food to.

I went on the rounds with a dalit dabbawallah called Ballaral. He told me that despite the wild complexity of the system, he never delivers a tiffin box to the wrong place. Over 200,000 lunches are delivered every day by around 5,000 dabbawallahs, and
Forbes
magazine recently claimed that there's only one error in every 6 million deliveries.

It's particularly ironic that Ballaral does this work, when in the countryside he wouldn't be allowed to touch the food of a higher caste member for fear of contaminating it. Higher caste children regularly abused Ballaral when he was growing up in rural India but here he has shaken off the stigma. It's been replaced by a simpler poverty prejudice. 'Some people don't let us into their home when we go to get the tiffin. Sometimes people even refuse to give us water.'

But at least it's better than systematic caste discrimination, and now that he has a proper job he can support his two children and his parents, as well as his brother, and his brother's wife and son. He earns £60 every week, which is a princely sum in Mumbai.

He says, 'I have a ten-year-old son and an eight-year-old daughter and by the time they grow up the caste system may be over. But I might not live long enough to see that.'

A week after we left, dalits rioted across the country demanding an end to discrimination.

• • • • •

India is touted as an emerging economic superpower, and it has one of the largest economies in the world. But the media tends to ignore the fact that it damn well ought to have one of the biggest economies, seeing as it has such a vast population. Over half of the world's hungry live here, for crying out loud, and 25 per cent of all Indians live below the poverty line. And all the hype about the modernity and dynamism of the country is lost on anyone who's really explored India. The place is a
mess:
its infrastructure is dire; it's desperately poor; and its turgid, bloated bureaucracy and endemic corruption is hampering progress.

I wish the best of luck to the middle classes, and the new technology companies and industry of India, but those 25 per cent who are desperately poor expose the grubby underbelly of all that progress. And with corruption, patronage and caste discrimination all alive and well, the wealth of those middle classes might never filter down.

The best memory I have of my time in India (and please excuse me if this sounds sentimental) was a moment as I left the Dharavi slum. On the side of a football-pitch-sized sea of raw effluent and rubbish was a large wooden box on legs. I peered into it and got the shock of my life. Inside were four beautiful little girls, all around six or seven years old. I asked what they were doing. 'Homework,' they said in Hindi. Then 'Hello, mister,' in English. And I sat with them for a while, giggling and pointing at the book they shared. And that's the image I took away from India: four beautiful little flowers of hope, sitting literally raised above the slurry, studying for a better life and wearing smiles as brilliant as rays of sunshine.

POPULATION:
1,321 million

PERCENTAGE LIVING ON LESS THAN
$2
A DAY:
46%

UNDP HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX:
81/177

CORRUPTION PERCEPTIONS INDEX POSITION:
=70/163

GDP (NOMINAL) PER CAPITA:
$2001 (107/179)

FOOD AID RECIPIENTS:
n/a

MALNUTRITION:
12% of the population

I'm hurtling towards a love affair at around 865 km/h. If all goes to plan I will land in Beijing in another four hours or so, and shortly afterwards, I expect to fall head over heels in love with the place. I should admit right now that despite all the cultural and historical importance, as well as the sheer size and power of the place, I've never really
understood
China. I've never felt affinity or empathy, even though my first-ever girlfriend was born there (OK, we were four and we only ever held hands, but still). I do have several things in common with the Chinese, however: like me, the Chinese are obsessed with food; they have a natural love of weird and wonderful ingredients; and they aren't shy of adding a bit of drama and spectacle to mealtimes. So I'm hoping that food is the perfect way to get under the skin of the Chinese, to understand a country that's changing at a bewildering pace and to try to understand what makes the world's next global superpower tick.

Is that too much to ask?

You're probably thinking, 'This place is a modern marvel, host to the 2008 Olympic Games and the world's second largest economy. Where's the danger zone here?' Well, despite all the international fawning over China (let's face it, it pays to be mates with the world's next superpower), it's still an authoritarian, highly militarized totalitarian regime; there's little freedom of speech, no political party except for the Communist party and there's widespread corruption. More importantly for me, China's relentless drive for economic growth has devastated agriculture, created a huge gap between the urban rich and the rural poor and caused comprehensive social damage. In spite of all this, I'm sure I'll find that China is a spectacularly successful country full of rich and complex characters – all I need is to find them.

It's taken me three months to get clearance simply to visit China to make a film about food, and I've been warned by the BBC to expect all manner of official intrusion. In order to get a permit I must agree to have a minder at all times, and to pay $100 a day for the privilege. And we're under strict instructions from our bosses not to mess them around and film things we shouldn't, otherwise the authorities could ban the BBC altogether.

Welcome to the Kung Fu Restaurant

I arrive at Beijing Airport to a murky soup of a day. The dust blows into Beijing off the Gobi desert, blotting out the sun and creating a shroud of general misery.

I meet my guide Yan Yan and the China TV (disconcertingly called CCTV) minder Penny, who couldn't look less like the miserable communist cadre I'd been expecting if she tried. She's a tiny, sweet and disarmingly pretty media student who says that she plans to make herself useful carrying bags and keeping an eye on the van. And another eye on us, presumably. I get the sense that there's going to be conflict between Yan Yan, whom we've employed to get us access to things, and Penny, whom we've employed to stop us getting access to things.

We drive through Beijing and I'm struck by the relentlessly shiny and spectacular forest of high-rise buildings. I don't know if it's urban heaven or dystopia. It's also a mess of advertising – every spare inch of the place is covered in high-tech signage.

Our hotel turns out to be the child adoption centre of Beijing, full of Russians and Italians road-testing babies. Disconcertingly, they are in the lifts all the time (maybe it's a way of getting the kids off to sleep). The parents gaze with newfound love at their little babies who are busy screaming their heads off, whilst a Chinese person explains, through a bouffant-haired interpreter, that everything is going to be fine.

My first taste of food in a new place is invariably at breakfast time, when I'm feeling least adventurous. Luckily, breakfast in the hotel is a festival of dull stodge: congee (a sort of steamed rice porridge), steamed dumplings, fried noodles and lots of doughnutty-looking things.

I venture out and visit the Kung Fu fast food joint, which sits right next door to one of the hundreds of McDonalds in Beijing. Kung Fu uses exactly the same colours as Maccy D's for its sign, but with the additional image of a fighter taking a boot at the Americans. It's one of China's relatively few successful attempts at brand-building, and it's a marvel of capitalist modelling. This is slightly disconcerting: I wanted to see a bit of communism.

As I walk through the door of Kung Fu the entire staff – about 30 people – yell at me and raise their right arms in a scary fascist salute. For a nanosecond I wonder if Beijing has been experiencing a spiritual crisis and they think that I'm their Messiah – I always wondered if there was something special about me. Then someone else walks in and they do the same thing. Apparently, much to my disappointment, they are just saying 'Welcome to the Kung Fu restaurant'.

I'm surprised at this Japanese-style zeal for service. During my visits to the former Soviet Union it seemed that service was a dirty word, and customers were treated like muck, so I was expecting the same from the Chinese, but these guys are as eager as a bunch of puppies. The childishly enthusiastic manager fits me out with a polyester polo shirt in the team colours, a polyester Kung Fu baseball cap and relieves me of my wedding ring and watch.

He shows me everything in his cramped high-tech kitchen – his cupboards, steamers, temperature gauges (his fascination for temperature regulation borders on the psychotic), trays, taps, and lord knows what else. After half an hour of inspecting catering equipment, I put a stop to it, much to his dismay, and ask him to teach me how to cook their most popular dish.

He shows me the mixture of MSG, salt and sugar that flavours the food. I throw half a teaspoonful in my mouth, and it explodes in a cloud of non-specific flavour. I can't speak properly for the next hour as my mouth tries to cope with an extended gauge of tongue.

We boil a large handful of lettuce with 50 ml of oil, garlic and soy, rendering it into a slimy but extraordinarily tasty salad. Never before has a lettuce contained so many calories. We also cook pork custard, which tastes infinitely better than it sounds. It's a simple steamed egg, water and pork mixture that's delicately flavoured (then boosted with a hefty whack of MSG) and wobbly, a cross between custard and set yoghurt. The food in Kung Fu is cooked to a precise formula of sizes and flavours and, as with McDonalds, consistency is everything.

The team shows me how to greet customers: as soon as someone walks through the door, elevate your arm to 30 degrees above horizontal, palms outwards to point the customers' eyes towards the menu, and shout at the top of your voice:
'Hwan ying guang lin zhen kung fu.
I like this aggressive approach to hospitality – it shows who's boss, whilst giving a cursory nod to servility. The Russians could learn a lot from these guys.

The boss of the whole company turns up to be interviewed, which is a bit of a coup, although, oddly, he brings his own film crew. They interview me about my experience here, but I don't have that much to offer as I have no frame of reference yet – it's my first lunch in China – but I tell them that it's very nice. They seem tremendously pleased with this.

Then I get a chance to interview the boss. I ask him how private businesses like this can exist in a communist country. He flinches at the word 'communist', as though I've insulted him. He says that this is part of the new era of private and public ownership.

'So how can two opposing economic ideologies like capitalism and communism coexist?' I ask.

He's dismayed – he wanted to tell the BBC about how cheap, popular and nutritious his food is, and how he's ripe for inward investment; he did not expect some fella in a polyester polo shirt to be asking all this difficult stuff. His PR lady huffs and harrumphs, and the boss flails and flannels at my questions until I finally give up.

After the interview Penny, our CCTV minder, is angry – she thought the programme was about food, not politics. I tell her that it's about the politics of food, and the colour drains from her face. She clearly thought that this was going to be a cushy gig.

'What's wrong with asking someone about communism?' I ask.

People don't like to discuss communism – they don't know anything about it'.

Eh? How can they not know anything about it – they are living in a communist country that's been run by the Communist party for 57 years. I presume that they are highly likely to be communists, and they must have some kind of view on the matter.

Penny shakes her head.

I don't understand what's going on. I'm not
accusing
people of being communist – I'm in China, for crying out loud; surely they're proud of communism, and can tell me all about it.

Penny looks to the skies.

I wander into McDonald's next door to have a nose around.

'No, you can't film in here,' the manager says.

'Is the food in here healthy?' I ask.

'No, not really,' says the girl on the till, with a friendly smile.

Carrefour

I visit Carrefour, one of the French supermarket chain's 78 Chinese stores. It's now the ninth biggest retailer in the country with sales of £1.3 billion. It's an odd thing, seeing the familiar European approach to flogging food, and it would feel like home if the place didn't have tanks of live carp to buy and a deli counter full of ducks' heads. The mall outside is full of Benetton, KFC, Sephora and the like. This place feels so capitalist, J just can't work out how the Communist party keeps going in this country.

I try some Great Wall red wine. It's awful.

That night I walk around the largest square in the world, and it sends shivers down my spine. Tiananmen Square is vast – 440,000 square metres to be precise. The exact number of people who died during the 1989 protests and its immediate aftermath ranges from 200 to 3,000 depending on whether you ask the government or the student associations. I'd assume a figure somewhere in between. Discussion about the protests is taboo in China (like discussion about the Cultural Revolution) and the news media is forbidden to report anything about it. And now I can't ask people about their fast-food business without terrifying the boss. What is all this about? I'm not even asking tricky questions about whether communism is right or wrong.

These people are terrified and I can't help thinking that a grown-up, responsible world superpower shouldn't be paranoid about free speech and political comment. Is China really ready to be the most powerful country in the world?

I visit one of China's largest dumpling factories and again, it's privately owned (I still don't understand how private ownership works within communism, but no one seems able to explain it to me). The dumpling factory is a little like visiting a battery chicken farm – from the calm, quiet exterior it's hard to imagine the horrors within.

I pull on a pair of white wellies, don a white jacket and face-mask, and walk into one of the vast work halls. Inside is a scene from Fritz Lang's
Metropolis,
with rows of identical workers (wearing identical clothing and masks, all individuality stripped away) lined along the tables, heads bowed and hands a blur of dumpling and fingers. All the sitting workers are female, but male supervisors stomp up and down the gaps between them, inspecting the dumplings for uniformity. It's a disconcerting but mesmerizing scene.

The workers take a dumpling wrapper (similar to a square of pasta but made with rice flour), put a spoonful of filling in the middle, then wrap it tight using their fingers and palms to make a distinctive shape. They do this over and over, for hours, weeks on end. The mundanity and repetition must be brain-rotting. They fill a tray of dumplings, put an identifying sticker on it, then place it on the conveyor belt in front of them, which takes it down to the quick-freezing plant at the far end of the factory. There's absolutely no talking, and the only noise is the rumble of the conveyor belts. This is a perfect dystopian image of the future.

The women are paid per dumpling, and in a ten-hour shift an average worker can expect to earn just under £3. Despite this, it's a sought-after job. I sit next to the factory's fastest worker who tells me that she makes around 7,000 dumplings a day. I ask if she gets bored, but she doesn't understand the question. I try a different tack: 'What do you think about when you're making dumplings?'

'I think about how to make dumplings faster and better.'

It's not surprising that she says this – I'm sitting with the boss of the company, and you wouldn't be seen dead in China saying anything that might make your boss look bad.

Chateau Zhang Lafitte

An hour outside Beijing lies one of the most extraordinary sights in China. After meandering through tumbledown villages (which Penny won't let us stop in) and filthy peasant street markets (which Penny . . .), I'm suddenly hit by the ludicrous sight of a vast, disconcertingly shiny Renaissance French chateau looming out of the paddy fields. This is Chateau Zhang Lafitte: a £40 million copy of the original 1642 masterpiece built near Paris by Francois Masart, and Penny is very keen that we stop here. The middle name gives the game away – it's owned by Zhang Yuchun, an influential member of the Communist party who somehow found some communal farming land that his party was happy to redesignate as private land to benefit . . . himself. It will come as no surprise that he's a former senior official at Beijing's municipal construction bureau.

The chateau is set in hundreds of acres of very immature landscaped gardens that used to be farmland but has now been rezoned as land for private housing. It's difficult to describe quite how out of place it looks. Imagine seeing a streaker at the Communist Party Congress. Yup, it's about that weird.