Guangzhou is famous for two things. Firstly, the tons of tat for sale. There is a toy market, a mobile phone handset market, and probably a small yapping toy dogs market. Today C and I bought pictures of the Twin Towers; bright orange funereal cups which will serve as egg cups; a hamburger phone (that was C, not me); some sandalwood incense to burn at funerals, and Chinese envelopes bearing a picture of flowers and the following text: “If Bill Gates could get you to smell the flowers online, he could make a pretty penny.”
The foreign concession area downriver has old colonial mansions, Lucy's American diner, the White Swan hotel, and a strip of shops offering laundry, baby clothes and strollers for rent. This is because the foreign concession is where American couples adopting Chinese babies stay. And stay, and stay. The process can take months, and according to C, you don't see the whiteys with their new Chinese baby anywhere else in Guangzhou. The foreign concession is probably less threatening. Having seen a bus head straight for me at a crossing today, with the driver looking straight at me, and only miss me by an inch because I jumped back, cursing, this is a view I am - at least today - sympathetic with.
The new parents are plentiful. In Lucy's diner, there were half a dozen tables-full of apparently mid-Western American couples. They were mostly heterosexual, but we saw two lesbian couples too. Most of the adopted children were girls. There was one boy who looked alarmingly like Andy Kaufman, only Chinese. He was very deft at chopsticks.
It's a very strange scene. Given the cack-handed one-child policy here, there's probably nothing wrong with Americans providing a home for unwanted Chinese girl babies. (They are unwanted because boys are better, obviously. And extra children don't qualify for health-care or education.) But the money involved, and the speed of the adoption process, and the sight of American couples carefully feeding their new Chinese daughter rice, and the well-oiled machinery of a world that I had no idea existed, is just, well, weird. Also, it may be slightly criminal: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/11/AR2006031100942_pf.html