The neighbourhood

Here is another back-post, this time from July 2006. So my three posts so far span about 20 months... but I hope to get into this more now that it's accessible.

The major change in our lives since last year is of course the arrival of Sam. He is now seven and a half months old, with red hair, large brown eyes, a single tooth and a very ready grin to show it off. He can sit up without falling down and, as of this week, has developed a determined style of commando-crawling directly towards any small or dangerous object in the room. He lights up whenever he sees Isaac and Isaac loves him wholeheartedly in return. If Sam is upset or I leave them together for a few moments, I will often come back to find Isaac singing a little song that goes, “you’re the best and the coolest in the world – Sam – you’re the best and the coolest – Sam.”

Being here with a baby has brought to light some interesting aspects of Chinese culture. For a start, people here are amazed to see me with Sam at all. “Are you looking after him yourself?” they ask in astonishment, “that’s incredible!” then they see Isaac and add, “two children! You must be exhausted!” Apart from the fact that most people still only have one child, very few of them actually raise it themselves: if they can afford to they hire a full-time nanny who lives and sleeps with the child around the clock, otherwise they enlist grandparents or other family members, often while the parents work away from home. This system functions well if it continues down the generations as people get to raise their grandchildren rather than their children. But it does lead to some disconnections. One friend told us that a colleague of his admitted she had never given her 5 year old son a bath! Another friend of ours confessed that she is not sure her 10 month old daughter actually knows who she is. But at least these are working parents - there are also those who just play mah-jong all day long while the nanny raises their child. We do have other friends who manage to work and still spend lots of time with their child, but they seem to be the exception, and even they are talking about sending the poor kid off to a weekly boarding kindergarten when he is 4 years old.

The Chinese tendency to tell other people how to do things is also exacerbated by the presence of a child, particularly on the subject of drafts and temperature in general, which is a national obsession. I have lost count of the number of times people have told me that Sam is incorrectly dressed for the weather. Sometimes within the space of 10 minutes someone will come up and remove his hat, telling me he is too hot, then someone else will tell me I should put a hat on him because of the sun. Generally they are more bothered by heat than UV. In the same breath they will admire his pale skin and berate me for putting him in a long-sleeved shirt. The sight of his little UV swimsuit appalls them, how could I possibly dress him up in form-fitting lycra on a hot day? AND a swim nappy! AND a hat! The combination amounts to child-abuse in their eyes. Babies here go in the swimming pool naked. How does this work? Good question. Our ayi (housekeeper) Xiao Long tackled me on the subject this morning, suggesting that Sam is too old for nappies and besides it is much too hot and he shouldn’t wear them, at least during the day. She said that her nephew, who is the same age as Sam, is already out of nappies and never wets himself, even at night! How do we manage that I asked her. She explained that it requires someone to be watching the child all the time, to sit them on the potty every hour or so and to keep a close eye for signs of needing to get there at other times. So now it all starts to make sense. Using this system you need to have a nanny or grandparent providing one-on-one childcare with no other commitments, because no parent in the world has time to maintain a 24 hour vigil on their child’s bottom.

Xiao Long offered to try this with Sam when we return from England so we’ll see if it works, at least during the mornings when she looks after him. I’ll let you know whether it is really possible to potty-train a 9 month-old. At the moment Xiao Long takes Sam out to play for a couple of hours every morning while I work. I am fundraising for a school in the area where Ethan works, as well as other projects. The school is the latest venture of our friend Dorje Tashi, the lama whom Ethan lived with when he was doing his fieldwork. He aims to provide a high-quality Tibetan language education to all 700 school-age children in the grassland area where he lives. If you’re interested I can send you more information. Already the Chengdu International Community Christmas Bazaar has agreed to donate all its proceeds to the school and I’m busy applying for grants and seeking other funding. I’m helping out with some other projects as well, and I’ve started an international playgroup that meets a couple of times a week and joined the committee of the Chengdu International Women’s Club and the advisory board of Isaac’s school, so it’s shaping up to be a busy year ahead.

Next year Isaac’s school is moving to a new campus a little further out of town, and he will take the bus. This means an end to our daily walks to and from the school’s current location. I will miss this in a way and was thinking how this short walk, less than half a mile, encapsulates many elements of life in Chengdu. We leave our compound out of a small side entrance that leads directly on to a major intersection crossed by a huge flyover, and turn left past the entrance of a construction site. Up until last year the compound where we lived was surprisingly peaceful, considering it lies right next to this intersection. But when I came back in February, construction had begun on the large empty lot next door and already 10 floors of a huge office block are in place, with at least 10 more to go. Construction goes on all day and most of the night, with a short lull between around 2 and 6 am. Then at first light they start again, with an ear-shattering hammering business designed to get us all up and in the mood for the noisy day ahead.


So I walk past the site with some feelings of resentment, despite the billboards announcing it to be an “International, Leading Architectural Synthesis” and supporting this with huge photos of 7 grey-haired white men drinking tea around a boardroom table.
This is typical of the slightly surreal edge things have here, at least the things like this kind of advertising that have been copied directly from the west. They are almost right, but something is a little off-kilter.

I mean, aren’t any Chinese people going to work in this building, let alone any women? But whatever I feel about it, construction sites are ubiquitous in Chengdu, and they all have eccentric English advertising. I saw one yesterday that claimed the housing compound inside will be 70% “more bushy” than other compounds.

Past the construction site we have to cross the road under the flyover. This is by no means as grim as it sounds. In fact believe it or not, underneath this flyover is quite a pleasant place to hang out. There are strips of landscaped park, a playground, a teahouse, an antiques market, calligraphy walls, bronze statues and friezes of traditional arts and crafts and children’s games, and even a small stage with a 3-d grey stone backdrop of old houses along a river. Here we pause every day to watch the middle-aged ladies of Chengdu take their morning exercise. One day it’s the fan dancers, the next its ballroom, after that the drum troupe and so on. Meanwhile people are strolling in the park or sitting in the teahouse and it really is possible to ignore the traffic thundering overhead and circling around. One elderly man is there every day practicing the French Horn and he couldn’t find a better location. I’m sure his wife thinks so anyway.

The resurgence of traditional Chinese culture represented in different forms under the flyover is one of the most pleasant changes to have taken place in China over the last 20 years. When I was here in the 1980s it felt as though China had left all its traditional culture firmly behind in the past, and that the grim, drab socialist-realist present was here to stay. But economic liberalization has wrought many changes and one of them is the gradual sloughing-off of the vehement hatred of “old” culture that is now clearly seen as an excess of the cultural revolution period. Like everywhere else in the world, China is now engaged in trying to create a distinct modernity that incorporates and keeps alive its traditional culture. People’s pride in their cultural heritage and fascination with tradition is apparent everywhere, from the myriad period dramas on tv, to the paintings of Tang dynasty poets and dancers in hotel lobbies and the fan dancers under the flyover. It’s alive in every kind of design from architecture to old ladies’ cardigans, and the results are often very attractive. Creating a culture park under a flyover may be a strange idea but it is a living space, widely used, and I’ve grown rather fond of it.

Also gathered here every morning is a gang of day-labourers, men and women in dusty clothes, leaning on their bicycles, a straw basket hanging on their backs, hoping to be hired for a day’s work hauling rocks on yet another construction site and keeping a sharp eye out for the police. For a long time Ethan and I felt very sorry for these people, thinking it must be such a desperate and precarious existence not knowing whether you will earn a day’s wage or not. However, a local friend explained to us that these people could easily get full-time work if they wanted to, but they take their chances with day-labour instead because this cuts out the construction company and the rate of pay is better. He also said that they work in gangs from particular rural areas and won’t let any outsiders join them. So now we view them slightly differently, noticing that they do all have bicycles and many of them new city clothes, and more often that not they do seem to get hired. It’s just another example of how little we really know about how life works here.

Next Isaac and I take our lives into our hands and wait for a gap to dodge through the traffic. This is the slow stream of local traffic as most of it is thundering above us on the flyover, but still there is plenty of it, from Mercedes and 4 wheel drive BMWS to tinny little local cars; motorbikes and deadly electric bicycles that zip up silently, often in the wrong direction and hordes of ordinary bicycles, some laden with produce or furniture or even livestock.

Once across the road we pass the Kempinski Hotel’s German beer garden, with its own micro-brewery and excellent apple strudel and set off down a side street to school. Just one month ago this street was lined with small shops and businesses, single concrete rooms where people worked and lived with their whole family. We would thread our way between clusters of bicycles, children playing and people brushing their teeth over the drain. There was a motorbike repair shop, a little mahjong parlour, a floury place selling fat steamed buns and a barbers shop with cages of songbirds outside the door, including a mynah bird that chirped “ni hao” (hello) to passersby. Supporting all of this was a rundown but highly respectable residential compound for retired army cadres. But a few months ago we realized that the writing was on the wall, literally, as the character meaning “condemned” appeared on all the buildings. In the space of a few weeks the compound and all the shops were knocked down with sledgehammers, probably by a gang of day-labourers, and a large white wall has gone up instead, within which a new construction site will soon appear.

It used to be an interesting walk, especially in the mornings when a little mobile market would gather at the compound gate so the retired cadres could buy their vegetables and choose a chunk of pork from a pig carcass strung up on the back of a tricycle. But it’s not surprising that this had to go. This is an up and coming part of town and there’s no room for retired cadres and steamed bun shops. Already the other end of the road is lined with up-market businesses: the Courage Man’s Beauty and Spa Salon, a boutique called “Fashion Walk” with price tags of several hundred pounds per item and a golf shop selling Big Bertha Titanium drivers. And in case you still have any doubts about the driving force of new China, they will evaporate around the corner, in front of a small gift shop called “Material”. This has a sign hanging outside it saying, “One may indulge in material things while keeping his ambition”.

The expensive boutiques and beauty salons continue along the street where Isaac’s school is located. In fact this street and another one are currently being renovated and turned into a “European style” shopping district, so no doubt there will be more material things appearing. But I hope that a few of the smaller businesses can hang on, particularly the dumpling restaurant run by a friendly couple from Harbin, where we often stop after school for pork and mushroom dumplings or a bowl of noodles. One hopeful sign is that the barber with the songbirds has moved into a corner of a larger establishment down the road, with his bird cages piled up outside and the same Mynah bird shouting “ni hao” as we walk past.

Before we forget where we are in all this material spendour, however, or who is really in charge, we also pass the local residents committee and police station with its long strings of slogans extending out along the nearby walls. They remind us that everyone is responsible for creating a civilized city and extort us to “Construct a safe and unified district, bring about comprehensive management measures”. Whatever that means, it sounds firmly in control of the situation.

We pass the One Stop Shop that sells Lucazade (joy!) and lollipops as big as Isaac’s head. Some days he manages to persuade Xiao Long to buy him one on the way home, contrary to my repeated instructions, and he arrives at the door sticky and triumphant, buzzing with sugar for the rest of the day. Finally, just before we reach school we pass a line of young men and women in matching suits performing a dance routine on the pavement. They are the sales force of the Maian Real Estate Company and every morning on the dot of 8:30 they gather to go through their motivational warm-up, though most of them look as though they wish they were still in bed.

Leaving the dancing realtors behind we are finally at school and Isaac rushes off to build lego airplanes, which is a competitive sport in his classroom. He is in the last few days of a summer school programme with lots of swimming – he has really taken off in the water in the last few months and we spend hours at one or other of the local pools. At the moment the weather is so hot that in the pool or at home in the air-conditioning are the only sensible places to be. It’s 31 degrees inside the house at 7:00 in the morning and outside in the sunshine it’s closer to 40 as the day warms up. But it’s the humidity that really turns up the heat. Our walk to school has been a sweaty business recently. But for once all of you in the UK are feeling it too!

This is Ethan’s busiest time of year, he is traveling a lot and will be at his project site most of the summer. Next week I take the boys home to England for a month, more time apart unfortunately, but we have booked a family holiday in Malaysia for October and are also making plans for Christmas and for Chinese New Year in Australia. As always we welcome visitors and would love to share construction sites, flyovers and dumpling restaurants with any of you who are interested.