The Shiz

We call it the Shiz because it took us a good five months of living here to learn how to pronounce Shijiazhuang in a way that Chinese people could understand. And it’s stuck because frankly Shijiazhaung is just too many syllables for everyday use.

It’s a modern city, barely more than a village fifty years ago, so there’s not much in the way of interesting relics. This is real China, but just not the one that people want to visit. It’s brand new supermarkets and street markets where things are sold from a rug on the ground, it’s gated communities and people living in tents under bridges, it’s a luxury car dealership and motorbike carts being mended on the street just down the road, it’s internet cafes and mah-jong played on street corners, it’s where seven people can eat like kings for sixty kuai (six pounds) and where businessmen will knock back several eight hundred kuai (eighty pounds) bottles of baijiu at a sitting.

motorbike carts being mended on the road where I live

We live out in the north west, fifteen minutes in a cab from downtown, in an area that is slightly ‘ghetto’. The street paving is somewhat sporadic, and is used as somewhere to set up a small business, to unload furniture, to practice ballroom dancing, to play badminton, to eat noodles or skewers, to park cars and as a children’s toilet and a general spittoon.

a scruffy looking housing estate near where I live: the apartments inside are probably very nice

I live in one of the scruffy, stereotypically post Communist looking apartment buildings, although my apartment inside is positively luxurious. When things aren’t breaking. Or being broken further by the people that were sent to mend the thing that broke in the first place.


pollution on a bad day, overlooking the school football pitch and track; after this we had four days of skies so clear you could see stars

Oh, and it’s also one of the most polluted cities in China. Meaning it’s one of the most polluted cities in the world. I’m convinced that I’m probably going to go home and develop some weird lung ailment that hasn’t been seen in the UK since 1860. On bad days, it’s worthy of Mrs Gaskell’s Manchester: you can see black smoke pumping out of factory chimneys, but not the apartment buildings in the next block. The constant layer of black dust that settles on everything means that only a few days after I’ve swept and mopped my apartment until it’s spotless, the floor will again be grey.


taxi company stamps and postboxes inside my apartment building

Despite this, I’ve come to be strangely fond of the place. It is fascinating to watch what China’s rise actually means in everyday terms: new pavements, freshly painted walls and smarter shop signs being installed as the area improves, building sites of new apartment blocks for the upwardly mobile middle classes on all sides, supermarkets selling exotica like coffee and biscuits, and fashionable young couples on dates at KFC or McDonalds. Most of all though, it is the people of Shijiazhuang that I will remember: people who are, in general, kind and helpful to a group of confused foreigners with extremely limited Chinese.

To have fun exploring other worlds, go here.

outside a downtown restaurant