Gary arrives in Fuzhou as the only foreigner on the train, gets met at the station by a sign reading "Teacher Gray," and learns his first lesson about Chinese food on the ride to his hotel.
Six or seven hours on a train from Hong Kong, heading south to a city called Fuzhou, and I had absolutely no idea what I was walking into. A recruiter had briefed me via an app called WeChat, which I'd never heard of before. Apparently, in China, WeChat is everything: payments, tax records, train tickets, hotel bookings, food orders. If it needs doing, it's done on WeChat.
The recruiter's instructions were simple. Get off the train. Find a young lady holding a sign. You'll know who she is. That was the full briefing.
I had a picture of China in my head that the train window immediately started dismantling. Mountains. Rice fields. People in straw hats. What I actually saw pulling into Fuzhou was tower blocks, office blocks, a McDonald's, a KFC. This was 2016, and Fuzhou was classed as a tier-three city at the time, meaning it didn't yet have a metro system, which apparently placed it lower on the affluence scale than tier-one and tier-two cities. The tier system works simply: improve the infrastructure, move up the rankings. But even a tier-three city looked nothing like the China I'd imagined from the outside.
It wasn't supposed to look like this. Where were the mountains? The rice fields? People in straw hats?
I was also, very visibly, the only foreigner on that train. A friend had warned me about this. He said that when he first arrived in China, people would stop him in the street to ask for a photo, treating him like a movie star. I am no movie star, I want to be clear about that. But I did stick out.
Off the train, bags in hand, signs helpfully printed in both English and Chinese. I found the exit, stepped out, and there she was: a young woman holding a sign that read "Teacher Gray."
G-R-A-Y.
I had to correct her the moment I reached her. My name's Gary. Not Gray.
Oh, I'm sorry. The principal's very busy. She asked me to come and get you.
Fair enough. She offered to take my bags. I declined, we sorted ourselves out, and she led me down to the car park.
Surprise one: a 20-year-old Mercedes S-Class, which, to be fair, looked pretty good for its age. And this young woman, maybe 19 or 20 years old, was about to be my chauffeur for the next hour.
We pulled out into traffic and I immediately noticed we were on what felt like the wrong side of the road. Right, yes, they drive on the right in China. And they do something similar to what you see in America: turn right on a red light. I've seen a few accidents that way. Very dangerous, I think.
"Do you like chicken feet? It's one of the things we eat here. Spicy chicken feet. Have you ever tried?"
She asked me if I'd ever tried chicken feet. Spicy chicken feet, specifically. My entire prior experience of Chinese food was chicken balls, sweet and sour, and fried rice. I had to be honest with her: no, I had not tried chicken feet.
She'd never been outside China. When I mentioned I was from London, she said she'd love to go there one day, said it the way you'd say it about somewhere you'd genuinely never considered reachable. That's not unusual, she explained. Many people in China, especially older generations, have never left and know very little about the outside world. That's shifting with younger generations, slowly.
Many people in China have never been outside the country, and know very little about the world beyond it.
The hotel was about an hour away. She told me to close my eyes and get some rest. I didn't rest. I sat there thinking about chicken feet and wondering what I'd gotten myself into.
It was going to be an adventure.
