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.

Love Letter

Sometimes, I love Brighton. Despite the pretentions, the attention seeking clothing, the rich people from London who become enamoured of it’s ‘cool boho-ness’ and move down, then determinedly price the said quality out, and make clear there it shouldn’t be anything that’s unsuitable for the eyes of little Jocasta and Huxley.

I love being able to browse a fabric shop stuffed with fabulous cotton prints and that the shop staff didn’t mind that I was walking round stroking bolts whose colours were particularly pleasing to touch. I love even more that my mother is going to make me (and hopefully teach me how) a cupcake dress.

I love having a pub lunch from somewhere where the staff aren’t forced to dress and act like clones, the food is delicious, good value and actually home made on the premises rather than ‘home made’ in a factory in Middlesex by underpaid labour of dubious legality.I didn’t love the caterwauling that passed for singing coming from some right-on festival at the Quaker Meeting House, but I loved that the festival was allowed to happen.

I loved finding new graffiti, and that Brighton is a city whose street art references the decapitated wives of Renaissance monarchs. (If you know that’s not Anne Boleyn, do correct me.) I love finding a street market selling a mixture of local produce, vintage clothing and costume jewellery, funky household bits and bobs, vinyl records and poetry. I love that when I was photographing the tomatoes and a guy reached out to try one, he apologised profusely and sincerely and I made a joke we all smiled. I love that the poet wasn’t a pretentious eejit, and said he was glad to see people laughing, rather than thinking we were mentalists. I love that the street was full of people doing what they loved and ignoring people who say there’s no point in writing, or making crafts, or small scale food production, because there’s no money in it.

I love that I got the train home regretfully, but inspired.

Love it, hate it, what's in your world this week?

The Great Frame Caper

Back in the mists of a timidly emerging Beijing spring, I purchased some paintings as wedding gifts for my friends. The prevailing framing choice was a ‘traditional’ Chinese scroll, which, however, I felt goes a little bit too far from ‘something cool my friend bought me from China’ towards ‘my house now looks like a suburban Chinese restaurant’.

No problems, I thought, they’ll look much better in something sleek and contemporary. Arriving home, picture framing wasn’t exactly top of my ‘to-do’ list, and I confess, I left it until a week before the wedding to get them – after all, it would just be a matter of nipping into a shop.

Obviously, it wasn’t until I was in the aforesaid shop that I realised that the standard frame sizes might be different between the UK and China, and that apparently Britain doesn’t do square frames anyway. I searched, I bought, I got them home and discovered they were slightly too small. I returned them, gave up on square frame and went for a rectangle with black mount.

I’m quite short, the frames were quite big and Brighton is quite hilly, so I alternated between accidentally banging my bags into the pavement [sidewalk] in front of me and holding them in my arms, only just managing to peer over the top in an endeavour to avoid the dozens of people that didn’t seem to notice that the person struggling to maintain control over a package half her size might actually need more room to get by than, say, a catwalk model about to die of heart failure.

But, I thought, hard part over, only black paper to get. I went into a paper shop, a shop that actually has ‘paper’ in its name, only to be told by the snotty sales assistant that they didn’t have any, as if I was some kind of loon for even thinking they’d stock something so boringly essential.

I eventually found black paper back in my home town, after finding that all the shops I thought would have it have either closed down or don’t, in a backstreet art shop run by someone whose demeanour and shirt pattern suggest him a potential warning for a teenage drug awareness campaign.

Seriously – all of this for two picture frames and two sheets of black paper? Please tell me the result was worth it. (And if you don’t, I wouldn’t say so, cos I might just find out where you live.)

All The Trimmings

How to Look Foreign in China

In Shijiazhuang, all Western foreigners looked alike. Brunettes were surprised to hear that they had fair hair: after all, Westerners have blonde hair so as long as your skin was white your hair was blonde. Similarly, green and hazel eyes all blur into one blue haze.

The allure of blue eyes to a Chinese female provincial teenager cannot be overstated. I would find that my normally timid students, who would sometimes stare in the opposite direction to me rather than make eye contact (I believe this is some sort of mark of respect rather than a symptom of avoidant personality disorder), would fix my with a slightly maniacal stare before announcing to me ‘Your eyes are so blue.’ Quite often this nuggest would be repeated several times, as I mumbled something like ‘erm, yes, thanks’ (I mean, really, what can you say?) as the conversation stumbled along the line between endearing and creepy.

One of my older students even went as far as to wear a pair of blue contacts. Worn over her naturally almost black irises the effect was startling to say the least. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was more reminded of something from a horror film than anything else, and after all, rare are the women who can honestly say that they were free from fashion faux pas at the age of seventeen.

Thankfully, voodoo isn’t native to China, as our blonde locks (even mine, which are more of a indecisive light browny colour when au natural) were quite the temptation to young students. Not only did I have to tell them that they could not pet my hair, and no, I didn’t believe that they had done it ‘accidentally’, but I actually had to tell some of them not to remove stray hairs from my clothes. Another one of my friends had a student request a hair from her, which she loving pasted into a scrapbook beside her signature.

This perhaps makes them sound odder and me meaner than really was the case. Certainly in Shijiazhuang, often people’s natural response to something unusual was to want to touch it, unaware that this is completely shocking to the Westerner on the receiving end! Also, lacking disciplinary authority, many of my classes, especially amongst the younger students, teetered along the borderline of chaos, and allowing any sort of liberty would result in them collapsing catastrophically.

Similarly, there was a standard image of what Westerners looked like, and no matter your personal appearance, I found that this imaginary prototype Westerner had a far stronger effect on Chinese people’s minds than the individual foreigner standing before them. Surprisingly, this was true not just in Shijiazhuang, but in the polyglot Beijing Silk Market, where the shoppers are almost exclusively foreign and most of the sales assistants speak English of a quality that would make many a Shijiazhuang English major envious.

At home, I am reasonably petite, at five foot four, I wear at size 10 dress and a size 4 shoe, meaning I was around the same size of a lot of Chinese women my age. One of my students once voiced positive outrage that I was the same size as her. However, this didn’t stop shop assistants invariably bringing out shoes or clothes a couple of sizes too big to start with.

On my last visit to the Silk Market I wanted to buy a trench coat (which has already been well used in our British Summer). The assistant insisted that I start by trying on the largest size first, which made me look like I had been assaulted by a parachute. Even then, we had to work our way laboriously through various degrees of L before finally hitting on the very happy Medium.

My small and narrow feet were the subject of scrutiny when I first started working at the school. Amazement at how ‘tiny’ my feet were (by laowai standards, perfectly normal by Chinese ones), dragged on for the first month or so of my appointment. To begin with, I was quite flattered, but after a week or so I began to have wild fears that someone was going to break into my apartment in the dead of night to chop my feet off (or, at the very least, take a photograph) for the local museum.