Canton Memories

 

Yesterday, Paul and I arrived in Guangzhou, better known in the West as Canton. This city is full of nostalgia for us. Shortly after Paul and I fell in love in Hong Kong, he got a job here with Esso China, and we spent many happy days and nights at the White Swan Hotel and Esso Tower, overlooking the Pearl River. That was back in 1984, when we were young(er!). We haven’t revisited this city since 1991, so all our memories of this place are from the 1980s.

Guangzhou does not seem to have changed much since the 1980s. For over 100 years, Canton was China’s connection to the West. The big British and American trading firms set up offices and warehouses here, in European-style buildings on Shamian Island, in the 1920s and earlier. After the Communist victory in 1949, the Westerners were kicked out, but China held a “Canton Trade Fair” once or twice a year, letting foreigners come in to sign deals for import and export of goods. When China started opening to the West in the 1980s, a few modern hotels were built, including the White Swan Hotel on Shamian Island.

Paul was part of the first wave of foreign companies returning to China in the 1980s. He worked for Exxon when it was exploring for oil in the South China Sea. His job was to do liaison with Chinese government officials. Those were exciting days, for Paul and me and everyone associated with the opening of China. Every week brought a new adventure. Paul took a helicopter to an offshore oil rig, negotiated with the Chinese about Vietnamese boat people who tied up to Exxon’s rig, translated for the chairman of Exxon, then the biggest company in the world, moved to Beijing to get to know national officials, and even traveled with a group of oil executives to China’s far west, including Kashgar, close to the border with Afghanistan. In those days, I was traveling all over China, interviewing officials, visiting farms and factories, profiling entrepreneurs and covering such amazing changes in China as the opening of a stock exchange in a Communist country.

For old times’ sake, we went to the White Swan Hotel for dinner. The minute we walked through the door, I felt a wave of nostalgia for those days, the 1980s, when we were young and in love and our careers were full of adventure. The White Swan Hotel looks the same – just as luxurious and beautiful as it did in the old days, with a high atrium in the center, a waterfall tumbling down from a Chinese pavilion into a lovely fish pool. Floor-to-ceiling windows on one side show impressive views of the Pearl River, which seems prettier than in the old days, with lighted tour boats cruising after dark. We ate a dinner of eels and bamboo hearts at the hotel’s Szechuan restaurant, our old favorite, and a young woman played delightful music on the guzheng, the Chinese zither. Memories of the 1980s flooded back to us – people we knew, places we visited, things that happened. After dinner, we walked along the streets of Shamian Island, where they are renovating some of the graceful old European-style buildings.

We are staying at the Dongfang Hotel – another place that brings back memories. This was the first hotel built for foreigners, across from the Canton Trade Fair site. It was crumbling under poor Chinese management during the 1980s, and friends of ours, from the U.S. consulate, who had to live here full time, told us they found rats in the sofas! Today, the hotel has gleaming marble lobbies, ultra-modern bathrooms, and a beautiful outdoor square with a flowing swimming pool, fish ponds, waterfalls, walkways, pavilions, and café tables.

The rest of Guangzhou, though, seems frozen where it was in the 1980s. Crammed with traffic, aging and narrow elevated highways, dirt-crusted buildings. In recent years, it seems, the money has flowed into Shanghai, instead. Guangzhou is no longer China’s window on the West, just a regional capital, albeit a region with a lot of factories producing for the U.S. market. We see very few white faces here, compared to Shanghai. We flew here on a jam-packed 777, configured with ten seats abreast and no leg room, every seat taken, and I saw only one other Western/white face on the plane.

Tropical – that’s the feel here. Palm trees and azaleas and other tropical greenery contrast sharply with Shanghai and Beijing. Every afternoon there is a thunder shower.

Dim sum – that’s the taste here! We went out for dim sum on Day Two.