I spend a good few hours wandering around. It is approaching late evening but families are out in their droves. They are all dancing or roller-skating or shopping. Soon it’ll be night time but no one’s in a hurry to head back home – they don’t seem to be addicted to TV debates here. New-found wealth has truly numbed the population into the trappings of the upper middle class. Even the smallest shopping mall is bigger than Delhi’s Emporio, where shop floors are little more than overflowing warehouses, and the workers of the world seem to have united under the hammer and the sickle and gone shopping.
Walking around Tianjin, its hotel lobbies, its massive open spaces, and another facet of this new China is revealed to me. No one here understands a word of English! Not one word. This has come as quite a shock. I was expecting – seasoned with all those documentaries of how the Chinese are learning English faster than we are forgetting Sanskrit, of how all our BPO jobs will be at risk come 2020 – I was expecting the people here to blurt quaint English phrases like “Goodness me – turned out nice and warm today, hasn’t it, dear?” at unsuspecting tourists – but nothing of the kind. Far from it, in fact. The McDonald’s staff – and they have all formed a helpful ring around me – doesn’t know what a “burger” is (I’m sure they know what it’s called in Mandarin). Worse, they are all laughing and giggling at me when I repeat the word “vegetarian” three times, each time with losing hope.
A few days later, I finally get the answer to why the Chinese don’t know a word of English. It’s because they don’t want to. Every factory, every cutting edge scientific institute or ultra-modern university I am ferried to, the signs are ominous. Metaphorically. Literally, they are all in Mandarin. The Chinese, I realise, now want the world to learn their language and not the other way round. It has finally dawned on them, the reason why the world learnt English, or French. Language is the first weapon; it’s the first of the many arrows that are let loose against unsuspecting people under the garb of global camaraderie and unity.
The Chinese understand this like the English or the French did before them. And they know this, too, that as surely as the sun rises and sets, the world will have to learn Mandarin, that they only have to endure a few more years of a befuddled visitor trying to make them understand with hand gestures what a burger is. They know that in the very near future this same visitor will walk confidently inside McDonald’s and thump the counter with his fist – like in the old Moods condom advert – and demand a “han bao”.