After two and half years we feel very settled in Chengdu and have made good friends. The ex-pat community is small enough to be very friendly and it feels like whenever we go out we bump into people we know. The ex-pat community is important because no matter how long we live in China, or how many Chinese friends we have, we will always be foreigners. This is how they see us, as much as how we see ourselves. Depending on the day and the nature of the exchange, the differences can seem interesting and amusing, or significant and divisive. The foreigner thing used to annoy me because I was translating it into a western context and imagining us calling out “foreigner!” or even less polite terms in English whenever we saw someone from another country at home. I’ve decided that it doesn’t really translate like that, it’s just part of the Chinese habit of stating the obvious. Just as they say “you’re going out” if they see you on your bicycle, or “you’re eating dinner” if they see you in a restaurant, so they say loudly to each other, “there’s a foreigner” or “haloooo old foreigner” or “there’s an old foreigner with baby in a backpack” whenever they catch sight of us.
Similarly they just cannot stop themselves from commenting on our children. Usually this is “two boys! Aren’t you lucky!”, an attitude which does not seem to have changed much with modernization. Often it’s: “you’ve exceeded the birth quota!” although that is usually said tongue-in-cheek. In fact in the part of town where we live there are many wealthy people who run their own businesses or work for private companies and have more than one child. They are fined but happily pay up. It is really only government employees who will lose their jobs if they have a second. There is often a large gap between the children, 10 years or more, as if it took that long for the parents to change their jobs or become financially secure enough to have another.
The subject Chinese people have most to say on, however, is whether the children are wearing enough clothing. It’s some kind of reflex with them. They approach Sam, say how cute he is, then feel his hands or feet, or his leg to see how many layers he is wearing, then they have to say something, no matter how warm the day or how happy he seems, they just have to say: “his hands are cold, he isn’t wearing enough” or “he’s only wearing four layers!” or “he should be wearing woolen pants”. I mean, everyone worries that perhaps they are not doing the right thing by their children, but it’s a bit much when 1.2 billion people seem to be telling you so.
This matter did become clearer to me, however, after we went to Xiao Long’s home for lunch recently. I realized talking with her family that Sichuan people are used to living without any heating as it is a very recent addition to their lives. In the north of China people have always had heat but not here. Even if they have a heater, they don’t turn it on and they like to keep the windows open, so it is actually colder inside than out: a damp, bone-freezing chill, like a foggy English winter morning. That’s why they eat everything laden with chilli and wear so many layers of clothes - it’s the only way to stay warm. This applies especially to small children, who are wrapped up in layer upon layer. To the extent that several people told me in the autumn that Sam would not learn to walk until the spring when we started to take some clothes off him, because in the winter he would be wearing too many layers to stand upright! I have actually started to put more clothes on him that I think is really necessary, just to keep people satisfied, though not enough to prevent him from learning to walk. I just hope this doesn’t mean he will grow up needing to live in thermal underwear all year round. Anyway, now I’ve accepted that this is just something they have to do, I am less irritated by it. I think perhaps it is even a way of trying to be kind and show concern. So now I just shrug and smile, or sometimes ask if their children’s backsides aren’t cold, seeing as they are hanging out of their 10 layers of clothing?
The other thing the lunch with Xiao Long brought home to me is why she so often comments on how much stuff we have. She is always sighing, shaking her head and saying “too much” and I never really understood why. I mean we have much less stuff than at home because we only shipped a limited amount, although we have added to it. But at her home I understood: it was pretty much empty. I mean, it was furnished with beds, closets, tables and chairs but there wasn’t any clutter, nothing else lying around, no books, no toys really in her daughter’s room, no pictures, no decorations apart from the rather forlorn looking candle-holder I bought her for her birthday. No wonder she thinks we have a lot of stuff.
Last Sunday we went out for the day with friends of ours, the Dallas family, to visit their ayi Xiao Yang and her family in their village about 20 minutes drive out of the city. They are in an interesting position because they are still farming their land even though they all have jobs in Chengdu, but they are poised to become fully urbanized, or sub-urbanized very soon as the area is scheduled for construction, and within two years it will be absorbed into the rapidly expanding cityscape. Where Xiao Long lives is several stages along, it’s an area that has been developed but still has uncompleted roads, tracts of wasteland and small plots of farmland scattered around. As a result its not too safe and in fact she was burgled not long ago when two guys climbed up the drainpipes on the outside of the building and onto their balcony, then sneaked into the apartment and stole cash and cell-phones from the living room while they slept. Her husband tried to give chase but they got away. Apparently they targeted the apartment because the air conditioner suggested the family were relatively well-off. In that situation it's useful not to have a lot of stuff.
The family we visited last weekend doesn’t seem to own any stuff either, not even much furniture, although they also doing relatively well. Their home is a concrete block with 4 or 5 rooms, and the 2 or 3 we saw were actually empty, maybe a chair or two but nothing else, although they had moved the dining table and chairs outside to eat because it was a nice day. the family were extremely hospitable and we ate a delicious lunch, sitting outside on the grass looking at a sludge pit surrounded by weeds and trash. You should come here in the spring, they said, when the trees are out it's even more beautiful. They were serious, and the funny thing was that as the day wore on and we went exploring around the village and fishing in the sludge pit (atually an aquaculture pond, although no fish were biting!), it did start to look attractive in a dusty kind of way. We went home at the end of the day laden with enormous flat cabbages they had grown, and feeling like we’d had a really great day out in the country. It’s sad to think it will all be gone soon, along with much of the agricultural land around the city. A Chinese friend of ours owns a restaurant in the next-door village and that will not be destroyed because the government recently invested a lot of money in renovating it as a leisure destination for city folks. This same friend said that she thinks China won’t be an agricultural country for much longer at the current rate of urban expansion, although goodness knows where they will import all the veg. from.
Yes, we do have friends who don’t work for us! But I have written a lot about Xiao Long and the other ayis because their lives are typical of the average family, and they are in the process of transitioning from rural to urban life, like so many others in China. I continue to enjoy Xiao Long's company although she has become much more direct with me. Like all Chinese people she is very forthright and recently she has started lecturing me about how much stuff we own. She told me last week that we spend as much on fruit each month as her entire salary, which is definitely not true by the way. She also said that Isaac owns more toys than all her family’s belongings put together. Now that I’ve been to her house I think this one might possibly be true
