Six or seven hours south of Hong Kong on a train to Fuzhou, I had no briefing beyond a WeChat message telling me to find a young woman holding a sign at the exit. I cover what WeChat actually is for people unfamiliar with it: not just a messaging app, but the infrastructure of daily life in China, handling payments, tax records, train tickets, hotel bookings, and food orders in one place.

Fuzhou in 2016 was classed as a tier-three city, meaning no metro system yet, and the tier system works simply by infrastructure improvements moving a city up the rankings. None of that prepared me for what I saw out the train window: tower blocks, office blocks, a McDonald's, a KFC. The China I had pictured from the outside, mountains, rice fields, people in straw hats, had nothing to do with the China I was arriving in.

A 20-year-old Mercedes S-Class was waiting in the car park, driven by a woman of about 19 or 20 who would be my chauffeur for the next hour. She asked me within minutes whether I had ever tried spicy chicken feet. I had not. My entire prior experience of Chinese food was chicken balls, sweet and sour sauce, and fried rice. She had never left China, mentioned London the way you would mention somewhere you had never seriously imagined reaching, and told me that for many people, especially older generations, the world beyond China simply was not something they knew much about. She told me to close my eyes and rest. I did not rest.

Published on Subwave

https://subwave.app/@e3113/post/my-first-day-in-a-chinese-tier-three-city