For select Chinese skiers and snowboarders, there are WeChat groups whose names include the phrase Gan Dengyan: “Look on in Despair.” Despair is not open to everybody. In order to join, applicants submit their name, place of residence, and proper documentation in the form of an X-ray or other medical report. Despite the strict rules, a handful of interlopers have successfully penetrated Despair and returned with screenshots. In January, 2020, somebody called Ruirui recorded images from a WeChat group called Look on in Despair While Healing During the 2018-2020 Winter Season. Originally, this group had been dedicated to 2018-19, but the season of Despair was extended, because many people had yet to recover from their skiing injuries. Ruirui’s screenshots showed a total of three hundred and fifty-five members, including Feng Chao, Beijing, Torn Right Biceps; Dandan, Shanghai, Snapped Right Ankle Ligament; Zizizi, Beijing, Dislocated and Cracked Thoracic Vertebra; and Xiao Bai, Beijing, Too Many Injuries to Write.
Another person, named Dapeng, penetrated the same group and conducted a statistical analysis. He produced a two-thousand-character warning to the public at large, noting that, of the group’s injuries, twenty-seven per cent involved the lower limbs, twenty-two per cent were to upper limbs, and fourteen per cent were to the head and neck. Dapeng advised enthusiasts not to drink alcohol before skiing. He also offered a piece of advice that, to anybody who hasn’t made a pilgrimage to a Chinese ski mountain, sounds as cryptic as a Taoist maxim: “If you’re a novice, add a small turtle to prevent pain from falling on your butt.” In Dapeng’s opinion, the three main reasons for injuries are:
1. Bad psychological factors
2. Insufficient preparation
3. Excessive fatigue
When it comes to planning a ski vacation in China, the Internet is not a reassuring place. First, there are the slogans. In 2015, as part of Beijing’s bid—ultimately successful—to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, the government started a campaign to increase participation in winter sports. Officials adopted a Communist-style slogan that, though it had the benefit of being short, simple, and direct, was also White Walker-terrifying: “Three Hundred Million People Enter the Ice and Snow.”
Second, there are the reviews. In December, 2019, my wife, Leslie, started researching possible destinations for a ski trip with our twin daughters, and she couldn’t resist sending me some of the online comments she came across. As the only person in the household who had never skied, I knew that any vacation would require that I take lessons, at the age of fifty, from Chinese instructors.“There are truckloads of local tourists who come for a day of skiing,” one foreigner wrote on Tripadvisor, about a resort called Yabuli. “They are uninformed (some skied in dresses), have no idea about skiing, do not pay for instructors. They are plain dangerous.” Another review touched on lessons: “The instructors were very annoying, with one who kept hounding us to the point where we packed up our skis and went home, just to get him out of our faces.”
When the coronavirus pandemic forced the cancellation of our holiday, I was not very disappointed. But the following year, with all the persistence of a Despair groupie, Leslie resumed her vacation planning. She settled on a resort called Wanlong, which means “Ten Thousand Dragons.” Wanlong is in Chongli, a district in Hebei Province which will host a number of events during the 2022 Olympics. Leslie emphasized that Wanlong’s reviews were generally positive. But positive isn’t always something that makes you feel better. “If you have an accident and maybe break your right arm snowboarding, then I can tell you that you will be well taken care of,” one woman gushed (five stars!) on the Tripadvisor page for Wanlong. “I was in good hands at the hospital in Chongli, because they mainly deal with injuries from skiing.”
We scheduled our trip for mid-February, during the traditional Spring Festival holiday, when the Chinese Olympic Committee was also planning to hold a dress rehearsal for many events. The International Olympic Committee had made few public comments about the human-rights issues that loomed over the Games, although pressure to do so had been building. In early February, more than a hundred and eighty human-rights groups called for a boycott, citing the mass-internment camps in Xinjiang and the erosion of political freedoms in Hong Kong and Tibet.
There were also questions related to the pandemic. Since the end of March, 2020, very few foreign-passport holders have been allowed to enter China, and it’s unclear how this policy will be adjusted for the Olympics. Last summer and fall, China controlled the virus to the point where most cities experienced no community spread of COVID-19. But at the end of the year there were a few scattered outbreaks, and, in response, the government instructed many state employees not to travel during the Spring Festival, and some hotels required guests to show evidence of a negative COVID test.
The day before our departure, we all got swabbed. Government hospitals had instituted special holiday COVID rates—our local clinic charged us less than three dollars a test. We had decided to drive, in order to avoid hassles at airports and train stations. From Chengdu, the southwestern city where we live, it was more than thirteen hundred miles to Wanlong, in northern China. That kind of distance had been mentioned in one of the reviews that Leslie forwarded: “If you flew ten hours and took a train for three hours to get here just to ski, then you are an idiot.”
There are more than a dozen reasons that I had never tried skiing before I reached middle age. I grew up in mid-Missouri, where a popular poster featured the words “Ski Missouri” with a black-and-white photograph of a man in overalls, crouched over his skis, next to three mules in a muddy pasture. In addition, I had always recognized myself as a prime candidate for Looking on in Despair. My first job in journalism, a six-year posting as a paperboy for the Columbia Missourian, ended before dawn one morning in 1984, when I wiped out on my bike and suffered spiral fractures of my left tibia and fibula. In 2006, while reporting a story about the Great Wall for this magazine, I tripped over my subject and broke my left kneecap. In 2014, in Cairo, I snapped two bones in my right foot while running away from a demonstration that I was supposed to be covering. This makes me one of the few heroes in the industry with a history of work-related fractures that spans three continents and four decades.
Wait, there’s more. Broken jaw, 1977; compound fractures of the ulna and the radius, 1982; broken nose, 1997; fracture of the scaphoid, 2004. Some fingers, some toes. Why does this keep happening? All told, it’s fourteen broken bones, and an unflinching assessment determines the top three causes to be:
1. Other people’s mistakes
2. Bad infrastructure
3. Equipment failure
In 2007, after more than a decade in China, Leslie and I moved to a small town in Colorado, less than an hour from Telluride. But living near a resort is actually a good way to avoid skiing. There was no reason ever to take a family ski vacation: every Friday in January, the local public school packed up all the students in the third grade and older, handed out lift tickets that were heavily subsidized or free, and hauled the kids to Telluride for a day. On Saturdays, I stayed home and fed the woodstove while Leslie took the girls to an intensive children’s ski program.
Our return to China, though, exposed the family imbalances. I was the only person who couldn’t ski, but also the only one licensed to drive in the People’s Republic. In mid-February, there weren’t many others on the road; at the Yongchang International Hotel, in the northern city of Yulin, we were the sole diners in a cavernous banquet hall with thirty-five tables. A receptionist told me that, of three hundred and forty-one rooms, thirty were occupied. Staff at the hotel had carefully cut soap boxes in half, to function as little holders for cotton swabs, and taped the boxes in the elevators, so that guests wouldn’t have to touch the buttons. During the three days that we travelled, one new symptomatic COVID infection was reported in all of China.
On the final day, we drove across a long, barren stretch of Inner Mongolia. The previous year, in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, the region had planned to host China’s National Winter Games. But the games were postponed because of the pandemic, and now, a year later, gift shops at the highway rest stops were trying to unload products branded “Inner Mongolia 2020.” Inner Mongolia 2020 pens sold for ten yuan, cell-phone covers for thirty-eight, and flash drives for a hundred and twenty-nine. Everything featured two smiling cartoon figures, Sainu and Anda, wearing traditional Mongol dress—mascots for an event that had never happened.
“I packed only the essentials.” Cartoon by Amy Hwang Link copied
We reached Chongli’s town center after dark, as snow flurries began to fall. By Chinese standards, the place was small—thirty thousand residents—and in the past it had been the district seat of a poor agricultural region. But now there was construction everywhere, and the town square featured a huge silver statue of a snowboarder. We drove past rental places named Crazy Skier, Brothers Ski Club, and Happy Journey Bear Ski Shop. Leslie made sure to point out the large illuminated sign in front of the brand-new branch of Peking University Third Hospital: “Sports Medicine.” All around town were posters with Olympic slogans, some in slightly off-kilter English:
To Prepare and Host the Winter Olympics in a Green, Sharing, Open, and Clean-Fingered Manner.
In Colorado and other parts of the American West, ski towns have a standard genesis story. Usually, there’s a connection with some mines that went bust, and often a charismatic individual envisions a future in skiing and tourism. Over time, the narrative changes to a tale of excess. Real-estate prices become obscene; boutiques sell things that nobody needs.
Chongli’s early development included these basic elements: the mines, the charismatic tycoon, the sudden influx of capital. But, as with many Chinese versions of things that are familiar in the West, the details seem to have been scrambled and redefined. It’s like reading a translation in which the meaning of each word has been shifted ever so slightly, until, in the end, it tells a different story.
In southwestern Sichuan Province, there’s a remote place called Shimian Xian: literally, Asbestos County. During the nineteen-sixties and seventies, four brothers named Luo grew up in Asbestos, where their parents, like many residents, worked for the state-run asbestos mine. Their father oversaw mechanical repairs; their mother served as a clerk in the statistics department. By the time the Luo brothers were in their thirties, the industry had been shut down. But the government never changed the countyname—even now, more than a hundred thousand people live in Asbestos.
One day in the early nineties, Luo Hong, the youngest brother, preparing to celebrate his mother’s birthday, discovered that he couldn’t buy a proper cake in his underdeveloped town. In response, he decided to open a bakery. The business became successful, and he expanded to other cities. He partnered with the second-oldest brother, Luo Li, who had attended a vocational school in Gansu Province, a remote part of the northwest.
