Dean’s scavenger hunt for cheer is from the summer 2025 issue of VICE magazine: THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here—or buy the summer issue on its own.
China is a cheerful and optimistic place. There are signs of this everywhere. Signs that say, “ENJOY LIFE”and “GREAT” and “HAPPY.” In the window of a café are the bright burning words: “Everything we do is to remind us that life is good.” I cannot imagine seeing that in London and certainly not in New York. Folk here don’t seem unusually jolly, but the signs are everywhere.
A giant Balenciaga ad in the arrivals hall at Shanghai Pudong International shows a Chinese lad in a very wide cropped jacket, massive jeans, and long dress shoes that curl up at the front. He looks like a Venetian clown. On the taxi ride to my serviced apartment building, I see a woman on an electric scooter wearing a motorbike helmet with a small flower on top of it. The flower is made of little balloons. At the building I wait in the lobby. The elevator arrives, and a child-sized robot in a bowtie rolls out, cheerfully bleeping. There are smiling anime-like characters everywhere, mostly attractive young girls and sweet animals drawn in superflat saccharine styles, possibly by AI. Here, the Ghibli-fication of the world has already happened.
Having circumvented the great firewall, I check Twitter to see what’s going on back home in the West. The very first tweet says, “This is the wildest thing I’ve seen on this site” and leads to a photo of an obscure rapper posing inside a blood-splattered apartment. Below that is a reply with a photo of his dead body down on the road, he’s covered in a white sheet, but you can recognize his skinny jeans and white sneakers. “Damn,” someone comments, “he didn’t even get to change his clothes.” I am far from home.
In the cyberpunk West China metropolis of Chongqing, my taxi driver goes quickly and recklessly, constantly switching lanes as a cute, computer-generated anime girl in the corner of his map tells him where to go. There are sexless AI girls with near-identical featureless faces everywhere. At the very fancy and very cheap hotel I have chosen, I am offered a smoking room; it has been a long time since this last happened. (I think to myself that Michel Houellebecq might find some contentment, perhaps, if he moved to a hotel in Chongqing.) Everyone smokes in China. As soon as I stepped out of the airport, I was met by a slow, muggy fragrance of hot concrete and cigarettes, which is one of the most beautiful aromas in the world. There are signs everywhere saying not to smoke in the toilets, but someone has always been smoking in the toilets. There is often a dude hanging out there, smoking. Others gather in the middle of convenience stores at 1AM to smoke, for no discernible reason.
Just outside the most fluorescent shopping center in Chongqing, a crowd surrounds two pretty young boys. They have their own lighting and cinematographer, and are livestreaming breakdancing routines across the country. Behind them, a cosplayer dressed as a maid and her plainclothes accomplice pour some water on the ground and pray to the puddle, and then take a photograph of her standing in it. A huge number of girls and some boys seem to be roleplaying as milkmaids these days, even in postrevolutionary Communist China; in this sense, Marie Antoinette has won.
There are visions of the future here that are not doomed. At the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall on People’s Square, a short 3D film shows what the city will look like in ten years, in 2035. A holographic whale leaps in the Huangpu River; a girl drops in at the skatepark on a hoverboard, chased by her robotic dog. Down by the water, the poured-concrete ‘1933’ mall occupies the site of the old Shanghai Municipal Council Slaughterhouse. It is among the most extraordinary buildings in the world. Designed by British architects in the 1930s as a modernist Piranesian bad-dream machine, its series of spiraling, interlocking staircases, 26 air bridges, narrow raised passageways, and sharp corners were arranged to flow cattle and workers alike. It is a labyrinthine Art-Deco abattoir made for killing millions of cows in Brutalist choreography.
After declining to visit a bar staffed only by robots, I went into the most neo-noir Starbucks I have ever been to, and they were playing Aphex Twin. (“Avril 14th,” 1933.) Pure bliss. The birds bob a little lower in the sky here. They are the same sparrows, the same magpies, as everywhere, but appear more relaxed in the thick humid air, allowing themselves to fall further, for longer, before taking another flap. In the middle of East Nanjing Road, China’s busiest shopping street, I spotted a girl dressed like a forest troll, in a humongous red wig of translucent plastic leaves that stretched down to her ankles, stood at a kiosk doing scratchcards.
The smoking, the scratchcards, the sparrows, the dead cows, the sublimely austere municipal architecture—it’s always raining—Aphex Twin, non-threatening eye candy, skating badly down the park, breakdancing in the shopping center—it’s like a strange version of 1990s England. This is what the future is like: the England of my youth. I’m even drinking tea, only the tea is salty and foamy and cold, and made with yak milk and boba, and comes in hundreds of varieties. It is speaking through me in waves of sugar and cream, writing these lines as I lie in my bed on the 17th floor, watching the rainbow light patterns on some building in the distance.
There is this old woman sitting next to me in another Starbucks now, in the Raffles City mall, overlooking People’s Square in the rain, examining a notebook full of numbers written in different colors, in thick felt tip, in numbered rows on every page. All of the strings of numbers are five digits. She appears to be memorizing them. She keeps falling asleep even though she is drinking a coffee. After drifting off and waking again a few times she takes out a different notebook, also filled with rows of numbers, and begins to write a new string: “4 … 7 … 5 …” in green, and then switching to black, after some deliberation, “0 … 8.” I wonder why she is scribbling down all these arbitrary-seeming numbers in her notebooks. But then I realize I’m doing the same thing, scrawling lines of random text. I haven’t seen anyone writing in a notebook here except me with my letters and her with her numbers. Perhaps if she were to stop writing them, the world would end. On my left, a young woman is just watching videos on her phone; I enjoy it because I have been thinking too much about the book of numbers. She is watching a video of another young woman carrying a very large green gourd through an airport, which seems self-explanatory, but a great number of Mandarin text overlays are flashing across the footage throughout. Perhaps she has to keep watching these videos on her phone as well, to keep the world from ending.
In Shanghai, I keep finding that technology and faith, or divination, are blended in novel and interesting ways. There’s a very cool model/actor/artist in his early twenties in the film that I’m over here working on. He’s called “Lit.” One evening, after we wrap, Lit bounces out of the art museum and into the Bund in a flat cap, vest, and big over-ear headphones, talking speedily to himself and smoking. I ask one of the producers what he’s doing, and they say he’s a Buddhist. He’s chanting Buddhist mantras very quickly, probably listening to them at 2x speed, in an act of hyper-devotion. This might be the opposite of doom-scrolling. Lit doesn’t engage with anyone in the taxi to the jazz bar, just keeps his headphones on and listens, floating away in the holy text, and then, when we arrive, chain-smoking very thin cigarettes. Is this enlightenment?
“It feels like there is a crisis of meaning here, just like everywhere else. But then it is up to us to come up with new meanings, or else to enjoy the chaos and great malleability of a time in which no one knows quite what to believe”
Dean Kissick, VICE writer
At a restaurant I’m introduced to a glamorous lesbian It Girl who tells me you can use AI to converse with friends and even dates, if you’re nervous. I can’t tell if she considers this a good or a bad thing. Her friend, a casting agent, tells me she’s been asking DeepSeek (a Chinese AI app with a whale for a logo that British and American government officials are banned from using) about her past lives: she has seven past lives and a 3,800-year-old soul. She was once a Celtic druid, which explains why she used to dye her hair orange. She was once sacrificed to a Mayan god, and her heart is kept in the British Museum; good luck getting that back.
It feels like there is a crisis of meaning here, just like everywhere else. But then it is up to us to come up with new meanings, or else to enjoy the chaos and great malleability of a time in which no one knows quite what to believe. When I arrive at the museum one morning, there’s a Chinese man sat outside in a paramilitary uniform: camouflage combat pants, black T-shirt, blue beret. It turns out he’s one of the actors in my scene. I realize this later, when he changes into his costume of black riot gear. He’s playing one of two policemen that come to rough up my character (a bisexual cabaret MC) and keeps enthusiastically putting me into a stranglehold during rehearsal, although it’s not in the script and not even in shot. He is a happy and optimistic fellow, but I can feel that he could easily kill me. I ask the director to tell him that he doesn’t have to put me in a stranglehold. I ask someone else why he came dressed as a soldier and she says she does not know, that’s probably just his thing. When we’re done shooting, he puts on his own clothes again, his camo and his beret. Thanking him for coming, I note that the logo of his shirt says “PMC Wagner” (the public-private partnership Russian mercenary army that was run by rogue warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin until his death in 2023). “Yes, Wagner,” he responds, grinning widely. He asks where I’m from, who I am. “Life is a game,” he tells me, then leaves.
Follow Dean Kissick on X @deankissick
This story is from the summer 2025 issue of VICE magazine: THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here—or buy the summer issue on its own.
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