Loose and Periodic Cross The Road.

our quiet side road

Death had to be hovering nearby. Our taxi driver swerved, banged his horn, slammed on his brakes to avoid a bus pulling out, cut up other cars avoiding a collision by millimetres, smacked the horn again and nearly ran over a cyclist, and I viewed all this when I was almost delirious from three hours sleep in 48 hours, jet-lag, and brain melting humidity. How was I going to be able to live here when surely I was going to get run down just going to the shops?

I'd assured myself I'd prepared well. I'd read about Beijing's crazy traffic, but speeding through the city on the way to train station, it had been busy but orderly - packed cycle lanes fenced off from the roads of nose to tail traffic. Here, there were parked mopeds in the cycle lane, so bicycles and scooter and these ubiquitous moto-carts in spilled out in to the car lane, where buses and taxis jockeyed to occupy the same bit of potholed tarmac at the same time. Oh yes, and even if the pedestrian crossing was working, cars and bikes and those damn moto-carts that snuck up on you without you hearing until you had to leap out of their path at the last minute could still turn.

“How do you cross the road without dying?” I asked my new found friends at dinner. They were still alive after a month, so I figured they had to be doing something right.

“You just have to step out. The traffic will flow around you.” This was not entirely the response I had hoped for. The only image of flow I had was of my body flowing into the road under the wheels of one of the lumbering green buses that my taxi driver had suicidally refused to defer to.

On those first solo trips to the supermarket or park, my concentration on the traffic was so great I didn't even notice the yells of 'hello' that would infuriate me so much in later months. I'd risk whiplash trying to keep all areas under surveillance, yet still a horn parmp or bell ring would send me leaping forwards in panic. A month passed. Nothing hit me. I became more confident, and made sure I never told my parents about how we'd stand in the middle of six or eight lane roads, waiting for the gaps to appear, or the maniacal taxi drivers that would bring me home most nights.

Spring came. I'd learnt to ride on the back of a bike without holding on, or flinching in terror as cars squeezed past. I'd step out and let the traffic flow around me. One day, on the way to the supermarket, I stood on the white line as a bus thundered past on each side, only centimetres of swooshing air between me and several tonnes of metal. My residency was stamped.

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This is an exercise I did for my writing class, and I thought, recycle, save the world...or my fingertips from suffering typing related erosion. Anyway, the point of it was to use a combination of loose and periodic sentences, preferably topped off with a soliloquy. I kind of flaked out with the soliloquy, as the nearest I ever get to one is rushing about before I leave the house in the morning, patting various pockets going, 'Phone. Lunch. Argh, do I have my locker key? Do I have my security card? Forgot my scarf. Where's my scarf? Which fool put my scarf in my bedroom when it should clearly be left by the door?...' and so on. I figure I can persecute you all with it, but I might leave it a few weeks before revealing to my fellow students that I have the brain of an eighty year old who goes to the shop in her slippers.

But anyway, back to concept of loose and periodic. Does anyone else think periodic has got a really bad deal here in the naming stakes? Loose sentences are well, loose, and long, and delaying gratification. Loose sentences probably spend their down time being bought champagne cocktails and dancing on tables. Whereas periodic sentences... I imagine them loitering in an under heated area of the office, and trying to impress the newbie with their hard won precise knowledge before slinking off to eat a cheese sandwich alone.

Or, you know, that could just be me.

Want other 'unique' world views? Clicky here.

Doorways: My Yard

When I was living in Shijiazhuang this door became one of the silent background elements of my life. Like every other apartment block in our area, the yard surrounding the building was edged with a rows of brick built sheds, which tended to exhibit various degrees of ‘looking like they might fall down right now’. (These are pretty much Chinese Shed Premium Edition.)

Waiting for coffee or pasta water to boil in my kitchen I would half watch fellow residents wrestling their bikes in and out of the sheds, reassured that the compulsion to keep stuff that is broken or no longer needed but might come in handy one day is cross cultural.

Snowy Shiz

One of my friends just emailed me this picture from Shijiazhuang. Last week they had two feet of snowfall and the school was closed for four days, which no doubt came as a welcome break for my former students, whose night classes (after a 7.45 am start to lessons) are now finishing at 10pm.

I'm hoping this picture is going to make me feel warmer in comparison!

Love/Hate

en route to the gym

Things I miss about China:

· Moments where I’d think ‘wow, I’m LIVING in China’
· Backstreet barbeques, ‘our’ restaurant, the wonton shop
· My students (some of them!)
· The markets selling delicious fruit and vegetables and snacks
· Despite the language barrier and occasional shoddy taxi drivers, the relative ease of getting around
· The people watching
· The continual sense of discovery
· The satisfaction when I managed to say something in Mandarin and someone actually understood me
· Getting free entry, free drinks and free snacks in nightclubs (we were like an added attraction)
· Going to places I never thought I’d visit

what the local park looks like at the moment

Things I don’t:

· Being at the internet mercy of the Great Firewall of China
· Feeling like I was permanently on display from the moment I left my apartment
· Having ‘Hello’ screamed at me repeatedly by random strangers
· Shoddy taxi drivers
· Finding it almost impossible to purchase clothes not covered in spangles or cartoon characters
· Only being able to get decent coffee at McDonalds
· Having to go to Beijing to get English books

· The spitting – well, until I started doing in myself

a sneaky snap of one of my classes

Once Upon a Time in China

this supermarket kept me in coffee and chocolate - what more could I ask for?

Let me tell you about one of my proudest moments in China, the moment when I first thought: I can do this, I can survive here, everything’s going to be fine. This epiphany didn’t happen over seeing one of the many wondrous historical sights, or contemplating the small scale diplomacy I was engaged with everyday. It happened over an alarm clock.

The purchasing of the alarm clock at the supermarket – my first unaccompanied visit – had been fraught enough. There had been extreme confusion over the method of having to pay: choosing the clock and communicating this choice through some comedy gestures, taking a handwritten slip to a booth, handing over my money and getting a my slip stamped, then returning to the electronics area to get the clock. Completing this process involved a lot of pointing, a lot of lost wandering, a lot of me thinking ‘I can’t understand anything, what on earth have I done coming to this crazy country, was I insane, when can I go home?’


the courtyard and entrance to the senior school building

So imagine my dismay when the clock stopped the next day. I was sorely tempted to just go back and buy another one, seeing as at least I now knew how this process worked. But…I hadn’t gone to China to teach English, not speaking any Chinese and with no teaching experience, to avoid doing things because I had no idea how to do it.

Armed with my phrasebook and the ability to say ‘ni hao’ and ‘xie xie’ (hello and thank you), I took the clock and my handful of receipts back to the store. I toddled up to what I presumed to be the information desk, and for once I was right.

I ‘ni haoed’ in my friendliest fashion and pointed to the ‘I need a refund, this is broken’ section in my phrasebook, then at the dysfunctional alarm clock. The staff behind the counter not unreasonably spoke to me in what seemed like tongues and then realised that the laowai who probably looked like she’d been smacked around the face with a wet fish didn’t speak any Chinese. They conferred amongst themselves.

The one who’d drawn the short straw of dealing with me came to inspect the phrasebook and the clock: I pointed and gestured again, then they conferred again. This happened a few times, and then they pointed towards the electronics department.

my street

After waiting for a member of staff to appear in the electronics department, I repeated the pointing routine. I’m not sure who was more over-awed: me at trying to deal with this through my jet lag and general confusion or the shop assistant at having to deal with a real, live foreigner.

After some more conferring and demonstration of why the clock was broken, and that another battery did not solve the problem, and a few members of staff trying, rather unsuccessfully, to appear to casually wander past, I had a new, working clock.

I left the shop on perhaps the most unexpected legal high I’ve ever had.

Street Food

I photographed these street vendors in my last week in China, as I tried to petrify my experiences into pixels. The hustle and bustle of provincial China is definitely something I find myself missing, along with the attitude exemplified by the sweetcorn guy: he might be poor, his life might be a struggle but look at him: the ambitious light and determination in his eyes, the humour and willingness to make the best of any situation he showed as he struck a pose for the crazy laowai.

I really admired the entrepreneurial, enterprising spirit that I met with in almost everyone, and the society that encouraged such dreams by not mocking people’s dreams and the proliferation of street vendors, allowing quite impoverished people to start their own business.

Fear and Loathing in Shijiazhuang

Last week I wrote about the wonderful experience I had when I photographed neighbourhood mah-jong players. I was a bit afraid to approach them, after the experience I’d had when I went to photograph some of the few remaining traditional style houses in Shijiazhuang.

a motor cart driver who didn't mind having his photo taken

I was really excited to do so, as I’d thought that all of them had been torn down to make way for the ubiquitous apartment blocks of modern China. And I was probably just in time, the houses on one side of the street had already been knocked down.

i have no idea what this is, but it looked cool!

Now, a slight diversion. Even when I was just shopping or in the park, people would come up and ask to take photos with me. Normally, people were delighted, if amused, when I took their photograph, and likewise, when I was snapping something that was boringly normal to Chinese eyes but fascinating to mine, there might be laughs or looks of puzzlement from onlookers, but never anything unpleasant.

So, I spuddled off to the old house neighbourhood and started clicking away. Inevitably, I attracted attention, but by this point in my sojourn I was used to being stared at. I asked an elderly woman sitting in front of a house if I could take her photo, and was surprised by how aggressive and unfriendly her response was.

I moved along the street, pretending not to notice the small group of people that had gathered around the photophobic woman. I couldn’t, however, ignore the growing atmosphere of hostility.

the other side of the road

I’d often felt frustrated, sometimes even upset, by my everyday encounters, but this was one of the very few occasions where I felt threatened. It quickly got to the point where I felt seriously uncomfortable, and had to cut my expedition short.

I have no idea why the presence of myself and my camera aroused such animosity – the only reasons I can think of is that either I unluckily stumbled across a group of extreme xenophobes or perhaps they had been screwed over in some sort of property development deal and having a wealthy foreigner wandering around snapping their neighbourhood was salting the wound.

Mah-jong

It took me a few weeks between noticing these Mah-jong tables and plucking up the courage to go and take photos of them. Eventually my fear of being shouted at and generally made to feel unwelcome was overcome by knowing how annoyed at myself I’d be if I went home without getting some photographs of it.

And I needn’t have bothered worrying. The woman who ran the tables was delighted to have me snapping away, pointing out the best angles, and eagerly poring over the results. Although she wouldn’t let me take a photo of her, as she said she was too ugly! But never mind, as I’d sneakily taken one of her earlier – she’s in the last photo wearing a black and yellow top.

She even offered to show me how to play, which had to decline as I don’t think my Mandarin was up to it, plus I’m not particularly good at or interested in games. The owner and her friend roared with laughter (in a nice way) when I told them ‘I’m very stupid at this’, and I went on my way after lots of smiles and thank yous, feeling full of the joys of living in China.

I Suppose I'd Better Give This a Title: Cultural Confusion

Sisters and their pet dog in the market, Shijiazhuang

Reading Esther Garvi’s post about the misconceptions that many people have about Africa, immediately brought to mind some of common misconceptions many foreigners have about China , and the ones I came across talking to my Chinese students and friends.

About China:

1) The biggest misconception has to be the one child policy. Whilst everyone I met in their twenties was an only child, most of my teenage students had one, and occasionally two, siblings. Parents would have to pay a fine, and the child wouldn’t get free education and healthcare , which in any case was more or less nonexistent. The only people that seemed to have to adhere to the policy were soldiers, who would get dismissed if they didn’t.

2) Chinese people don’t like pets. Well, despite pets being described in my Mandarin course book as ‘an unwelcome bourgeois habit’ (want to come round and tell that to my cat?), pets are incredibly popular, and often devotedly cared for. My students told me that most Chinese people treat their pets like children.

3) A whole family living in one room, even if they were reasonably well off. Perhaps 30 years ago, but it doesn’t happen now, at least not in Shijiazhuang, unless you are a migrant family on the bottom few rungs of society.

4) And how can I not mention the dog eating? When I told my senior students that a common image of China is people chowing down on a Chow, there were gasps of horror and I was told in no uncertain terms that it was very cruel to eat dogs, and that it was something only done by the Cantonese.

About the UK:

1) Men don’t wear bowler hats and carry umbrellas.

2) London is not foggy.

3) British people don’t hate Chinese people and think they are ‘less’ than British or white people. I was astounded when I realised that in Shijiazhuang, students are actually taught this. That I clearly didn’t hate my students caused quite a few of them a certain amount of angst as they had to try and process the fact that the reality of what they were experiencing differed considerably from what they had been told and unconditionally accepted.

I did have to agree that we British are obsessed with talking about the weather though!

I also made friends with various people who served in the military in various Middle Eastern, African and Asian countries, which made me realise what an absolute crock of shite the media peddles about non Western countries.

The Restaurant

The Restaurant was the first place I ever ate in Shijiazhuang, less than 12 hours after getting off the plane. I remember my first horrified, jet lagged, culture shocked reaction: all I could see was shabbiness, grubbiness, and an astonishing lack of hygiene.

I couldn’t eat much of the food that visit, and I couldn’t imagine that by the time I left I would rather eat there than at a fancy, expensive restaurant. I couldn’t imagine how I would sit, back in the UK, and fondly remember the beer poster decorated walls, the friendly family who ran it and the delicious Sichuan dishes, that I despair of being able to find here outside of Chinatown.

I miss being able to text or skype a friend for dinner or lunch, and then five minutes later ordering our favourite dishes, perhaps kung po chicken, perhaps vinegar potatoes and garlic green beans.

Baijiu anyone?

It was one of the few places I could happily eat at alone too, as I knew the owners would send any drunk Chinese guys who were ‘being friendly’ away with a flea or two in their ears.

I remember how surprised I was in the first few weeks when I saw men knocking back a bottle or two of baijiu at lunchtime, and our own students, even the thirteen year old ones, enjoying a beer or two or more. (The school did, however, have to stop turning such a blind eye to student drunkenness after some of the junior students tried to set fire to the school in a drunken stupor.)

Vinegar potatoes.

I was amazed too, at first, that you could buy a big bottle of beer for the equivalent of 3p. Although seeing as one of the refrigerators was used to store staff clothes, you couldn’t always be sure of getting a cold one.

Kung po chicken. My favourite.

We liked to mix our dishes with our rice, unlike most Chinese people who prefer to have their rice plain at the end of the meal

Disposable chopsticks. You could get round ones (like these) or square ones. We much preferred the square ones and were quite miffed if only round ones were available.

You might not believe me when I tell you that the photo of the fish tank was taken at its cleanest. When a customer ordered fish, the chef would come out from the kitchen, reach his hand in, grab one and take it, still flapping pathetically in his hand, to its doom. If the fish managed to leap out of his hand, it would writhe on the floor, sometimes managing to cover a surprising distance before being recaptured. Every time this happened, I would have to stifle the urge to scream and stand on my chair, which is probably slightly strange. Once, after a particularly spirited struggle between man and fish, my friend was horrified to find she had a patch of fish scales in her hair.

Visit other worlds.

Going Away Party

Thursday was the very last time that I got together with all my friends in China. It had been raining on and off all day, which by the time we left the restaurant had turned into a summer downpour.

Taxis there were none, so we waded to the bar through the filthy water: when I got home I had to wash off a calf high brown tide mark. I like to think it was just mud, but given the dubiousness of the sewerage system in the Shiz…

Arriving sodden at the bar I didn’t really feel in the party mood, and probably would’ve gone home if I thought I could’ve got a taxi. Thank goodness I didn’t though, as it was one of the best nights I had in China – everyone managed to overcome the petty irritations with each other that had become more obvious as the second semester wore on.

You can’t actually see it in the photo above, but a great deal of entertainment was had by melting and burning gummy bears in the candle flames. Ah, the results of an expensive education!

It was slightly surreal to say goodbye to the people who have been my day to day companions for the last ten months, knowing that I will probably never see some of them again. But there was still excitement as we talked about the hoped for trip to Chicago I want to make next summer.

And the next morning I left the city for good on a train to Beijing.

I spotted this cat in the convenience store as we were buying some booze before dinner.

Coming Home

Thank you all for your well wishes for my journey home: I had a delightful last weekend in Beijing, a good flight, and since arriving home at about five yesterday evening have enjoyed a takeaway Indian meal with my family, a shopping and lunch trip to Brighton with one of my closest friends and cat adoration, all of which I badly missed in China.

Before I readjust to England, I wanted to record how my hometown, Worthing, looks through ‘China eyes’. On the way home from Heathrow airport, the first thing that struck me was how sedate the motorway traffic was, compared to the honking and weaving and constant near collisions of Shijiazhuang.

Then I noticed how intensely green southern England is at this time of year: it seemed like someone had poured a tin of green paint over the countryside.

And everything is so quiet. When I first moved to Shijiazhuang I thought the noise was going to drive me insane, but I’ve gotten used to the constant honking, the trucks going over speed bumps that rattle my apartment windows, the school bells and announcements, the noise of students, my neighbours banging their doors and yelling at each other on the stairs – and did I mention the honking? Now Worthing seems eerily quiet, the streets too deserted – where is everyone?

Walking to the train station today, the near silence actually started to make me feel quite oppressed and anxious.

I’ve always thought of my town as nothing special, and certainly parts of it are scruffy and, like so many places, it is blighted in spots by ugly brutalist rip buildings and unimaginative apartment buildings. But as I walked down the main street I realised how beautiful some of the buildings are, how blessed the location and how little anyone appreciates what we have here.

Oh, and I’ve had to restrain myself from spitting on the street, smiling at random children, saying ‘xiexie’ instead of ‘thank you’ and putting rejected food on the table in a restaurant.

Ferris Wheel

Since my first week in Shijiazhuang I have meant to ride the ferris wheel at my local park, and since we have started to be treated to clear skies I've redoubled the intention. But, you know, riding a ferris wheel a five minute walk from you….there's always something more 'important' and pressing to do, or the weather isn't right. So on a blue skied day last week I realised that if I didn't ride it then, I probably never would.

It was only as my carriage started its ascent that I remembered that I'm scared of heights. There ensued an odd moment where I started to panic that, alone on the ferris wheel, I'd panic about being so high up. Then I told myself to get a grip on myself, and whipped my camera out to distract myself by taking photos.

Oddly, having a camera in hand completely negates my fear, and I can become quite intrepid. Occasionally, such as the time in Italy that I nearly walked off the top of an amphitheatre, I am reminded of why feeling a bit wobbly when looking down from a great height was probably an evolutionary advantage.

The view from the top was definitely worth it: from one side you can see across the park and even glimpse the mountains outside the city, and the other side there was that quintessential sight in modern China, the building site, and the high rises of downtown.

Big Beard Barbeque

Backstreet barbeques are definitely one of the things I will miss the most about China: cheap and delicious food and beer, consumed in a relaxed atmosphere where people frequently get so drunk they fall off their stools and men sit around topless, showing off their tattoos and pushing out their fat stomachs to show off their wealth. Although the moneyed middle classes aspire to Western ideal of toned, slender bodies, among rural born Chinese men, a big belly proudly announces to the world that you have enough money to eat plentifully.
 

Last week I tried out 'Big Beard' barbeque with some of my friends: 'Big Beard', unsurprisingly, the man in the  first photo, and really only needs a parrot to complete the look. We also had whole quails, which kept us all quiet for a few minutes as we manipulated the carcasses to get at the meat, getting very greasy fingers in the process. It was a wonderful, friendly evening, even if I didn't feel quite so chipper in the morning!

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Last Days in the Shiz

I am now into my last days in China: next Sunday will (providing the gods are willing) see my flying back to the chaos of Heathrow. As I am going to Beijing this weekend and the next, that is only 6 more days in Shijiazhuang, and so everything has taken on that heightened awareness that comes when you are aware that a clearly defined period of your life is ending.

 

It is strange to walk the streets that have become an everyday backdrop to my life here, and realise that very soon taking in the barbeques, people eating and playing cards on the street, the motorcycle cart men, the kids running about, the building sites, the cranes, will all be over and done with and the greatest probability is that I will never set foot in this city again once I leave it next Friday.
 
A note in answer to a question from my last post: I have been reasonably adventurous in my eating habits, having happily chowed down on sparrow and donkey, but I found I drew the line at sea cucumber and duck heads. I couldn't bring myself to eat dog either, although it is an uncommon foodstuff here in northern China and most of my students were horrified when I told them that a widely held stereotype about Chinese people in the West is that they all eat dog.
 

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Summer Rain

I was off to the gym, and took a quick look outside to decide what to wear. The yellow pre-storm light told me I would be going nowhere, and sure enough a few minutes later I heard a crashing sound - the rain starting. I'm not sure if China has a monsoon or not, but the summer rains here are certainly impressive. Ten minutes later, there was over a foot of water in the yard, and my friend had to cycle back from the gym knee deep in water.

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Scenes from outside the museum

There will be no scenes from inside Hebei Provincial Museum, as I was refused entrance because I didn't have my passport on me. Although exceptionally bizarre and infuriating, given the attitude towards foreigners often manifested in this city, I wasn't terribly surprised. And before anyone tells me off for not carrying my passport with me, I was told not to by the policeman that issued my residency permit, owing to the prevalence of pickpockets in the city.

 

Having spent forty minutes on a bus, followed by a fifteen minute walk, to get to the museum, my kind readers are probably able to take a guess at the particular phrases that I muttered to myself as I walked away from the ticket booth.

 

So I decided to pretend that the square outside was an open air exhibition. The main portion of the square had been turned into an open air car showroom. Eager and stylish young sales assistants, wearing ever-so-fashionable sunglasses, snuck off to take phone calls in between showing cars to clients.

 

The cars themselves were divided into two categories: the cheaper Chinese brands and more expensive Western branded but still made in China cars. The people looking over the expensive cars had a self conscious swagger in their step, telling me why such a public place would be chosen to sell cars.

 

The Chinese cars were being browsed mainly by couples in their thirties or early forties, who tended to look both slightly intimidated and nervous and proud all at the same time.

 

If so moved, you could commission a variety of rather tacky and vulgar photo portraits, the epitome of which was the eighteenth century lord and lady of the manor one above.

 

The square also had a thriving pigeon population that provided a wonderful source of entertainment for children passing through the square: I watched as one toddler started to chase the birds, before getting frightened and running away, making it look like the birds were chasing her!

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