06 April 2006
Nightmare in Taiyuan
Many reading the following story will no doubt assume it's a hoax. So I'll post the entire URL at the end, and after reading the text, you can go and check. If it is a hoax, then AP and USA Today are both victims, and there could potentially be quite some fall-out.
The basic premise is that a US citizen intending to travel from Hong Kong to Taiwan ended up in Taiyuan, entering a nightmare and terrifying world. [Cue scary music, and read on if you dare...]
Business flight across China leaves man stranded
By Curt Woodward, Associated Press
SEATAC, Wash. — As the sun dipped low in the sky last Sunday and his plane began its descent, Eugene Nelson had a sinking feeling that something was wrong.
He'd been in the air for hours, much longer than his business flight from Hong Kong to Taiwan should have taken. Then the airliner flashed a map of his flight's path on a video screen, and it hit him.
Instead of descending toward the island off China's eastern coast, the next stop on the Intel Corp. engineer's itinerary would be the remote city of Taiyuan, an industrial center deep within China.
Similar spellings and pronunciations. But a much different place, as Nelson would soon find out.
Something odd here. You don't walk into a travel agent (or anywhere else) and buy a ticket to France. The first thing you'll be asked is where in France you want to go. This is true of Taiwan. Most people would be flying to Taibei (Taipei) which doesn't sound much like Taiyuan even in the most mangled pronunciation. Tainan (another Taiwanese city) might barely be the culprit, but this is highly unlikely. If he's on a tour for Intel, wouldn't company travel agents have made all the arrangements?
There's a further problem. My timetable shows no direct flight from Hong Kong to Taiyuan. A quick check with a contact in China confirmed that a change of plane in Guangzhou (or Shanghai) is necessary. Did he overlook this?
Either the direct flight has started in the last few days, or this story is looking increasingly flimsy.
"Oh my God, it felt like someone poured a bucket of hot water on me. I realized I was literally 200 miles south of the Mongolian border,"
Such ignorance. He was "literally" 350 miles from the Mongolian border. (He was only about 130 miles from the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia.) Don't they do even the simplest fact check any more?
Nelson said Wednesday, after a tearful reunion with his wife and three young children at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
"That's when dread just came over me," he added. "I don't know how else to explain it."
Paranoia? Xenophobia?
Nelson, 39, of Littlerock, works for Intel's facility in the Pierce County town of DuPont. He was in the middle of a swing through about a half-dozen Chinese cities, checking in with business partners, when he said an apparent booking mistake left him stranded in the Chinese interior.
Let's be clear here. Shanxi is one of China's poorer provinces, but its capital city, Taiyuan, has a population of around 2 million, plenty of towers and the usual hideous modernization. You wouldn't mistake it for Beijing or Shanghai, but you might well mistake it for dozens of other cities. And if you're "in the middle of a swing through about a half-dozen Chinese cities" you'd certainly already have seen much the same even in the major metropolises.
His first night was spent trying to find out where he was and how to get to a hotel, Nelson said during an interview Wednesday at the airport, with his wife, Michelle Chewerda, and the couple's two sons and young daughter looking on.
Another puzzle. What kind of visa does he have? It would need to be multi-entry, or he'd have been held at the airport and sent back on the next flight to Hong Kong. Or his "halfway" point hadn't included a mainland city yet.
His first attempts at finding lodgings revealed the problems of the language barrier — Nelson said he ended up at a brothel, and had to "damn near fight my way out."
Just how stupid can this man be? The airport is a mere nine miles from town, and obviously he got into town somehow. The airport, unless it's unique in China, would have had large adverts for hotels with phone numbers, and names in English/pinyin as well as characters.
He returned to the small airport in the city of about 1.5 million,
Actually, it claims 1.83 million urban, and 2.93 million altogether.
but found it was about to close and officials would not let him sleep inside.
How very unreasonable of them. I wonder why they thought he should stay in a hotel.
Nelson said he might never have found his way if not for a helpful young woman who spoke a bit of English and arranged for friends to loan the obviously distressed American money and give him a safe ride to a hotel.
As we find later, he has an American Express card. Unsurprisingly, the top hotels take this. The CITS Mansion, the Shanxi Grand Hotel, and the Yingze Binguan, for instance.
"She probably saved my fricking life," he said, nearly breaking into sobs.
Oscar! Oscar! I can sense a movie on the way. "Stranded in Darkest China." Those of us who know both Seattle and Taiyuan would probably feel safer walking down the streets of the latter at night. This man was only at danger from his own stupidity.
After using the hotel's rare international dialing capacity to make some calls,
This is absurd. Even the roughest dorm has international dialling these days. There's nothing rare about it.
Nelson said he spent the next few days attempting to collect a wire transfer of cash
He could simply have drawn cash over the counter at the largest branch of the Bank of China using his Amex card.
and arrange a flight out of Taiyuan.
Back to Hong Kong? Would that be via Guangzhou or Shanghai? It turns out he went to Beijing, and his terrifying ordeal caused him to go straight home from there, amazed to be safely back in the bosom of his family. Three flights a day to Beijing from Taiyuan, so it shouldn't have been hard.
After nearly endless hours of searching, Nelson said he found a bank that would allow him to draw the cash that American Express had wired him.
Found "a" bank? Wouldn't he have had to provided full details of a particular branch to get the money wired in the first place?
Then he spent hours figuring out how to get his account information translated into Mandarin so that he could access the money.
In between, Nelson said he faced danger and indignity, injuring his legs and back leaping out of the way of a reckless car and enduring the spit that some Chinese hurled his way.
These is getting beyond believable and beyond a joke. It's increasingly difficult to believe that this story isn't a hoax. But a contact at AP now assures me that there it is on their database.
People do drive with complete insanity in China. And people spit on the street rather a lot (although a lot less than they used to). They don't spit at anyone else: they just spit at the floor. They don't deliberately drive at foreigners. They deliberately drive at everybody. If the presence of "reckless cars" (presumably the writer means "reckless drivers", cars not having yet been demonstrated to have volition) is enough to make a Chinese city "dangerous" then the whole country is out of bounds.
Back at home, Chewerda was dumping money into her husband's debit account and working with the travel company, which she said was less than helpful at times.
"When I was talking to the guy from American Express, (he said) 'It says right here on my paper that they take American Express right out there at the airport,'" Chewerda said. But if that were the case, she noted, her husband "wouldn't have been there for four days."
There's absolutely no reason whatsoever that he had to be out there that long. He could have drawn cash directly over the counter on his Amex card at any time at the largest branch of the Bank of China. Had he gone into any of the big hotels he would almost certainly have been able to pay for a ticket with his card.
"It seems odd, but they'd end every conversation with 'Have a nice day,'" Nelson said.
American Express officials contacted Wednesday by The Associated Press either declined immediate comment or did not return calls seeking comment on Nelson's journey.
So do we understand, although the untidy reporting doesn't tell us, that the ticket was bought from American Express? If not, then how is Amex (admittedly a remarkably stupid and unhelpful company usually) at fault in this case? Perhaps for not telling him how and where he could use his card.
After getting his hands on the money the company wired to him, Nelson said he finally had enough cash to begin arranging flights out of Taiyuan.
This is ludicrous. There are more than 50 locations in Taiyuan where he could have picked up a Western Union transfer.
He met up with his acquaintances again at the airport, repaying their loans and trying to express his thanks, he said.
"Honestly, everyone who helped me, I'll never forget them," Nelson said.
He then hopped a flight, traveling through Beijing to Vancouver, British Columbia, and eventually to Sea-Tac, where he stood clutching his wife and children, mopping his own tears with the bright pink hood of his 16-month-old daughter Jodie's cartoon-character sweat shirt.
Interesting. Some of us spend hundreds of dollars deliberately to get to Taiyuan, typically on our way to Wutai Shan or Pingyao.
So how did it feel to be home?
"My God," Nelson said. "Better than I could possibly explain."
Let's hope he stays there.
Who is more stupid: the man telling the story, the AP 'reporter' who wrote this up, or the paper that published it? Note that AP has bureaux in Shanghai and Beijing (both with bad traffic and spitting) with reporters of good reputation who could have ascertained within seconds that this should either have been spiked, or re-written as a story about prejudice and timidity. It belongs at the dinner table, and not on the news pages.
A few years ago a singularly dopey English couple were briefly in the headlines after they booked tickets to Sydney on-line, and were surprised at how cold it was when they arrived: in Sydney, Nova Scotia (Canada). They were the laughing stock of the UK and Canadian media, and probably wider. This man's story is of the same calibre, except that his xenophobic reaction leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
Just how embarrassed is Intel going to be about being connected with this? There's a reasonable chance that the Chinese media will pick it up, and reprint it in Chinese happily bashing away at American ignorance and racism: it's an absolute gift to their own xenophobia and patronises them in a way most likely to cause a backlash.
There may well be considerable mockery of Americans by Europeans and others, and in addition, if the story blows up in China, there'll be further coverage of that.
Certainly someone should fire Curt Woodward. If he's a master of irony, then he's chosen the wrong medium.
Oh, and Taiyuan isn't marvellous, but it's well connected by luxury bus to Beijing, and express minibus to many other neighbouring cities. It doesn't have a lot to see, but the Jin Ci, a temple complex just outside town, is well worth a view.
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2006-04-06-strange-trip_x.htm
You'll note the date is April 6, not April 1. But it must be a made-up story, surely?
Should we believe anything the Western press reports about China?
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6 comments:
Nicely done. Always glad to see another writer taking the piss out of inexcusably bad news articles.
I agree ... this one sounds like an April Fools thing, but some quick fact checking does say that there is some truth here. The only thing that I can believe is that the reporter from Seattle was a friend of the lost guy and got caught up in his xenophobic delusions.
Thanks for the detail on the lack of direct flights from HK.
I wonder if the guy will realize how many people are in this country do not speak English and have significantly less resources behind them and yet do not die from the sheer terror of being in this country, which is a hell of a lot less friendly to non-native speakers than most places I have been.
God help us all.
When i first caught wind of this story, my thought was that the traveler and the reporter were both idiots. The traveller for getting himself into such a predicament, and the report fro actually thinking this is news worthy. But upon reading more about this in several sources, i suspect there is alot more at stake here than just a follish traveller. Your article cleary indicates so many of the gaping holes in this guy's story. Nonetheless, it will likely get picked up by the international press and again, we Americans, get to look stupid because of a few bad apples.
It really does sound like a made up story now that I think about it...did the guy arrive back home on April Fools day?
The AP story left out some details that don't necessarily take all the idiocy out of the story, but do shed a bit more light. From the Tacoma _News Tribune_: "Nelson, who’s previously traveled to China on business, called the travel company Saturday before he left Hong Kong because he thought the scheduled flight time was longer than it should have been, but a representative told him he was headed to Taiwan after a stop in Fuzhuo, he said." Complete story at http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/story/5642100p-5064079c.html.
Rather than throwing more light, one part of the news story quoted above seems to increase the idiocy, and another to throw in 'facts' that don't stand up to scrutiny. Firstly:
"Nelson, who’s previously traveled to China on business"
If he's travelled to China on business before, how come Taiyuan, little different from dozens of other Chinese cities (driving, spitting, etc.), is so terrifying? Has he always been met by minders, never allowed a moment to himself? Did he never walk on a street before? Perhaps his Chinese hosts realised he ought not to be allowed out on his own.
It's possible that the 'reporter', more used to tabloid 'journalism', made much of this up including the quotes, as is common in that sphere in which stories as constructed from nothing at all.
But the tears on return home seem to fit quotes such as '"She probably saved my fricking life," he said, nearly breaking into sobs.'
And secondly there are further problems with this:
"but a representative told him he was headed to Taiwan after a stop in Fuzhuo, he said."
Assuming that's Fuzhou, then it's at least in the right direction, but of course there are no flights to Taiwan from or via mainland Chinese airports (save a handful laid on specially for Taiwanese businessmen to return home for Chinese New Year, that leave from Shanghai).
So who is making this part up? The travel agent (who would need to be grossly incompetent), Nelson (who has already been demonstrated to be incapable of common sense), or the 'journalist' (who has already shown a willingness to ignore facts and to be party to general silliness)?
You said well.
I was born in Taiyuan. this story was already reported in different media of China, in translated Chinese. And all people laugh at that Intel worker.
However, that has never been a big news, or widely known. People in China never care such an American ignorant person's feeling.
But I do believe, there are more and more foreigners traveling in Taiyuan now, in places like:
Jin Ci, as you mentioned,
WuTai Shan, one of the largest Buddhism temple in China,
PingYao, the only city that never changed its old buildings through last Chinese dynasty.
The 'HuKou Waterfall', etc.
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