As China’s large cities morph into globalized centers, foreigners strike out across the Middle Kingdom

When I arrived in China about two and a half years ago, I expected Beijing to be a cacophonous hodgepodge of street vendors hawking their wares. I also expected that a good part of the population would be old men in Mao suits twirling gnarled walnuts in their hands, the cityscape behind them a bric-a-brac of ancientness, revolution and free-market development. While I woke up early every morning to eat doufu naor and seek out the company of the elderly men in a nearby park, I soon realized that the metropolis had been irrevocably spoiled by globalization, and I became convinced that the "real" China could only be experienced far beyond the city limits of the capital.

Shortly after I arrived in Beijing, I met up with Peter Hessler, author of "River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze" and "Oracle Bones," in a Sichuan restaurant near Houhai and told him about my plans to leave the city and head west to Hunan. He agreed wholeheartedly that seeing Beijing was only a part of understanding greater China. And so, in a not-so-unwitting reenactment of the Cultural Revolution, I went off to be re-educated.

Newcomers to China seem to run through several ideas about the 'real China' relatively quickly...

In Hunan, Zhangjiajie, I studied wushu like Mark Salzman describes himself doing in "Iron and Silk." I rubbed elbows with provincial Party leaders and talked to boatmen by the riverside in order to show off my local dialect. I studied Chinese diligently with a teacher at a middle school for peasant children and thought I was absorbing authenticity through my pores. But in the end, I became less and less sure whether or not the "real" China I was searching for was in this town, an oftentimes dingier and Lilliputian version of China's urban centers with fewer traffic laws and more coal furnaces.

Recently, I caught up with Hessler again, and asked him where he found his "real" China. But Hessler claims he doesn't choose the countryside over the big cities because he's "searching for authenticity [or] some quintessential China." It's much simpler: "I write best and most happily in the provinces," he says. For Hessler, experiencing the "real" China — a term he doesn't like to use — was never the intellectual exercise it was for me.

Whereas some are looking for big meaning in small places, others, armed with the bravado of explorers, are still in favor of the grand gesture. Thomas Carter, a Beijing-based freelance writer and photographer, recently returned from his monolithic tour of China. When I spoke with Carter upon his return, he told me with pride that, "I am one of the few living people in the world, let alone a foreigner, who has been to every province and autonomous region in China. Marco, Mao and Tom!" Carter, who describes his Mandarin as being "truly deficient," is proof that going out to find the "real" China doesn't require a degree from Peking University. The purpose of his tour "was to learn as much about Chinese people and culture as possible," and after returning, "I definitely consider myself an authority on the 'real' China," says Carter. It is undeniable that Carter saw first hand the immense ethnic and geographical diversity that exists in this country, but is reenacting a comparatively bourgeois version of the Long March really the best way to experience the nuances and intricacies that make up the "real" China?

Eric Abrahamsen, a translator of Chinese fiction who has lived in Beijing for the past five years, sums up the predicament of newly-arrived foreigners in China: "Newcomers to China seem to run through several ideas about the 'real China' relatively quickly — that a Serve the People satchel is real, that imperial China and its modern remnants are real [and] that anything particularly squalid or poor or broken is real." Abrahamsen acknowledges that foreigners come to China looking for a hidden something, "then at some point you realize that the Chinese themselves are engaged in the same hunt," says Abrahamsen, "and the game is more or less up."

It was the stereotype that every old man practicing taijiquan in local Beijing parks was a seventh-degree kung fu master that brought Maxim Manylov to China four years ago from Khabarovsk, Russia in search of enlightenment. He had spent his 20s serving in the Russian Special Forces, but when he arrived in Beijing, the "real" China he had come in search of quickly evaporated into thin air. According to Maxim, who now teaches his own homegrown mix of martial arts, he arrived "just in time to see the Chinese shoveling dirt onto the grave of wushu." Maxim may be right. After all, the Shaolin Temple seems a little less mystical now that it has its own website.

Mark Swislocki, a former professor of mine at Brown University and a China specialist, has given a great deal of thought to the complicated notion of what it means for something to be authentically Chinese. Upon first arriving in China, after having studied China extensively in college, he was particularly surprised to find "so little interest among the Chinese ... of [the] issues that had animated my interest in China: 'traditional' culture and the history of revolution." Swislocki had to discard his notion of the "real" China in order "to learn to appreciate the new kinds of 'Chinese' worlds my acquaintances and friends were trying to create for themselves." He describes this process as the "unauthenticating of anything 'Chinese.'" In short, foreigners have to make an effort to not impose their own definition of what the "real" China is, but rather let China and the Chinese define it for themselves.

While Abrahamsen, Manylov and my old professor have resigned themselves to never finding the China they came in search of, I wasn't ready to give up. This past November I dragged my wife to Inner Mongolia's windy steppe in order to learn about sheep herding, hoping for a taste of the "real" China. The houses in Kulun, the town where we stayed, were daub and wattle, and the extremely modest conditions proved how unforgiving the life of a sheepherder really is. But as Swislocki later pointed out, our "real" China experience was only temporary, and when we left the steppe to return home to our high-rise and heated apartment, the sheepherders stayed behind in their mud houses. As I waited in a Beijing bank to recharge my gas card upon our return, I had plenty of time, almost an hour in fact, to chew on the idea of the "real" China. But it was hard to concentrate as I kept thinking about the quagmire that heating my apartment had landed me in. "There must be a more efficient way of doing things in China," I thought to myself as I looked around for moral support from the 50-some Beijingers, waiting patiently and seemingly unfazed by everyday life here. Then all of a sudden, I realized that China doesn't get any more real than this.