Damned China

While visiting his son, who has gone abroad to work, Paolo Rumiz treats us to vivid glimpses of a little-known China: the guards motionless at the entryways of condominiums, hivelike skyscrapers in which thousands of men labor like insects, galloping rickshaws, hardy and attractive masseuses whose methods border on brute force (far from the eroticism typically misassociated with their craft), and basketball courts installed with brazen irreverence in the famous Forbidden City. And then there’s the ever-flowing human stream, “…the movement of one billion and three hundred thousand people, the circulatory system of an immense and complex organism,” which Rumiz contemplates examining as if “by x-raying its main arteries down to the tiniest capillaries.” Everything, even the widespread and much discussed Chinese custom of spitting, is seen here anew, thanks to the observant eye of a master storyteller reporting from the tainted heart of China. Number of characters: 55.540