Chengdu Journal

Don't Live in the Park!

2009-03-09T11:21:00.006+08:00

Jiuzhaigou Scenery

"Don't live in the park" is one of a list of admonitions hanging in the ticket hall of the Jiuzhaigou National Park in northern Sichuan Province. It could more accurately be translated as, "Don't stay overnight in the park", but after visiting for a few days I appreciated the more nuanced mis-translation. The only people who do live in the park are the residents of the "jiu zhai" the nine stockaded villages that gave the "gou" or mountain gorge its name. The villages are located mostly in the lower part of the valley, and one at the fork, where two more river gorges extend up into the mountains, each one a series of iridescent lakes and stunning waterfalls.

Friends of Ethan's who came to Jiuzhaigou when it was first opened to the public in the late 1980s, were horrified by the way visitors threw trash and trampled around the lakesides. But the park management soon realised they couldn't allow that to continue. Jiuzhaigou is now a supremely well-organized "earthly paradise" that manages thousands of visitors a day during peak times, whilst carefully preserving the natural beauty they come to see. But we were forcefully struck by how much easier it is to preserve the beauty of nature than the authenticity of human culture.

100 km of wooden boardwalks have been laid alongside the park's rivers and lakes so that visitors can file past the most spectacular beauty spots and photograph them from the best vantage spots, and even hike peacefully through the quieter stretches. Trash and waste are removed from the park's boundaries and there is no development inside, no hotels or restaurants or concessions apart from one visitor resource centre. But no-one can fail to notice that the approach to the park gates is lined with hotels, gift shops, restaurants and other facilities to cater for the multitude of visitors, begging the question of how the environment outside the immediate confines of the park is affected. The visitors flock here to see one carefully-tended valley, but what impact does their presence have on the region overall? If it’s true, as we heard, that the people who take the park's trash away wash the empty bags in the river just downstream and return them to be re-used, that suggests the ethos of environmental protection does not extend beyond the gates.

And what about the original residents? We were told that senior park officials claim proudly that Jiuzhaigou disproves the widely-held assumption that participation and buy-in of the local population is necessary for successful management of natural resources. Instead, in Jiuzhaigou they have been transformed into part of the attraction.

We stopped by the side of the Five-Coloured Pond to talk to a woman who was selling carved yak teeth key-chains, and asked her how business was going. “It’s slow,” she said, “there aren’t many visitors at this time of year.” “It must be much better in the summer,” we said. “No, not really, because we’re not allowed to sell like this in the summer. We’re only getting away with it now because there aren’t many park rangers around.”

I’m not sure about the accuracy of this statement, because the trinket sellers were everywhere and the women standing at key points with Tibetan dress-up clothes for tourist photographs have nailed up signs advertising their rates. Also the park rangers seemed to know everything that was going on: at least they knew what we were up to when we skipped out on our tour bus and hiked from one station to another. (We didn’t realize until we got there that the trail system was closed for the winter and we would be obliged to ride a tour bus to designated viewing points only. We opted to walk anyway, either along the roadside or, once or twice, around the edge of the sign saying ‘do not enter’.)

The trinket seller was generally disgruntled. We suggested that she must make a good living just from being a park resident and she shrugged and said that each household does receive a share of park profits, but that has gone down significantly this year and anyway, they are not allowed to grow crops inside the park anymore, so how else can they live? Judging by the elaborately decorated new houses and large cars parked in each village, and the tumble-down older houses in the background, we thought some people must be doing better than others, and the trinket-seller concurred. When we asked if she couldn’t get a job working in the park, she said you have to have connections to get a job, and you have to look the part as well.

Just as in Jiaju village, it’s easy to imagine how the wealthiest and most powerful families would be best-positioned to profit from the opportunities tourism presents. The benefits could end up being very unfairly distributed, depending on who is supervising the process. At least this woman was not happy, but one would actually have to live in the park, or very near it, to approach a real understanding of how people’s lives have been affected. Instead we could only see what was on the surface, and one aspect of that was shocking. On our way out, we hopped on a bus that called in at the largest of the nine villages. The tour guide bus announced that we would all be able to visit a Tibetan household and see how the local people lived. Sure enough, the bus pulled up in front of a large, newly painted house with signs at the gate saying in Chinese ‘Come in to rest and smoke – for free!’ Resting and smoking were the only things that were free. We entered the courtyard and I thought there must be a mistake, we had stepped into a gift shop instead of a family home. But in fact the family had turned their home into a gift shop, complete with glass counters and racks of clothing for sale.

So many busloads of tourists thronged around that it was difficult to move, but we managed to squeeze through into the living quarters, where the father of the family turned out barley bread at 5 yuan each and one of the three daughters sold small bags of barley. The walls were hung with large photos of the family meeting with different government officials and Chinese pop stars. Each table had a small plastic menu of drinks, snacks and tea for 25 or 30 yuan each. It was also possible to tour the shrine room and to go upstairs where the family’s bedroom doors were left open for visitors to view inside. As we gazed around in astonishment, a fellow tourist asked me in English, “Do you like Chinese culture?” At a loss for where to begin answering that question, I just said yes. It’s true, I do, but I wasn’t sure what type of culture, if any, was on display. That evening we discussed what we had seen with Carrie, a graduate student from the US, and Brian, a British man who had come to write a guide to park’s flora. We went over all of the obvious issues: as soon a place with a distinctive culture comes into contact with an outsider, let alone groups of tourists, then it begins to change, and who should manage that? Should anyone try to? If culture is kept alive purely for tourists, is it still culture or something else? The village house was more like a hybrid of gift shop and display case. We didn’t reach any conclusions but we wondered grimly how much the future of Ganzi Prefecture will resemble that house.

Ethnic minority doll key chains sold in the park

We decided not to return to the park the next day and instead we set off to try and find the Golden-haired Monkey Nature Preserve that our friend Andrew who works at the park, had recommended. As Andrew had lent us his jeep, we were able to make our way along the valley to where a large billboard of a monkey indicted the turn-off. We rattled 10 km up the river gorge, this one occupied by Han Chinese farmers cultivating their dusty fields. As the road petered out into a rocky path we found a half-constructed building, but no sign of any monkey preserve. Undeterred, we decided to hike up the gulley anyway to see if we could spot any monkeys by ourselves.

We spent a pleasant day hiking through the forest, first up to a fire-prevention station called “lower pasture” and then back down to the river and along its banks until it was time to turn back. The air was clean and there were snow-capped mountains on either side. We hiked all day and didn’t see any signs of monkeys, apart from some poo and tracks in the snow that were possibly of monkey origin. We didn’t see a single person either, only some cows. It was truly

peaceful.

possible monkey poo?

As we returned to the car we ran into a girl and her parents who were repairing the damaged road. The girl said that we would never see monkeys by ourselves, they live deep in the gorges and run around in the trees high overhead so you have to take a guide to have any hope of spotting them. It struck us that animals are even harder to control as a source of tourist revenue than people or waterfalls, at least if you attempt to leave them in the wild and not throw them in a zoo. Perhaps the half-constructed building will be part of a more organized monkey preserve, but we were happy enough with things as they were: the most gratifying tourism after all, is the kind were there are no other tourists.

Rain Day

2009-02-19T11:00:00.002+08:00

I can switch the display on my mobile phone from Chinese to English, which I do when I need to send a text in Chinese, or when I want to know the date in the lunar calendar. Most of the time the date is simply something like first month fifteenth day (today), but every now and then is a particular date, marking the beginning of a new period in the agricultural calendar. In Chinese the lunar calendar is called the nong-li, meaning farming calendar.

Over the years that we have been living in Chengdu, we have watched with interest to see how the weather changes following the Lunar New Year. The first year, on a chill, damp day about ten days after the holiday I went to buy an electric heater and was surprised when the sales girl told me they had already changed stock and didn't have any left. But it's still very cold I told her. Not for long, she replied, it's spring now. As I left the store I realised she was right, the sun was out and there was a definite feeling of spring in the air. And every year since the same thing has happened. The tenth day of the first month of the lunar calendar is called li-chun, the start of spring, and every year at around that time, the weather takes a turn for the better.

This year was really a test of my faith in this system, as the New Year occurred so early in the year by the solar calendar. Usually it's around the middle or end of February, sometimes even early March, but this year it was at the end of January. But sure enough, by li-chun, the birds were singing and the temperature had risen 5 or 6 degrees. Blossoms are out and, although we've had a few colder days, it feels as though winter is over. I expressed my surprise to Xiao Long that the weather had improved. "Well of course it has" she replied, "it's spring now, look on the calendar!" I realised that I need to ditch my solar calendar assumptions and read more about the lunar version: it obviously works, at least in China. Apparently not in the rest of the world, because at the same time the UK was under two feet of snow.

Yesterday, February 18th, was the 14th day of the first lunar month, called yu-shui, or rain water. Apparently it's a little bit like St Swithuns Day in the UK or Groundhog Day in the US: rain on yu-shui augers good rainfall for the next few months, but no rain on yu-shui means no rain for the next few months. This is bad news for the farmers, especially this year when the winter has been so dry thus far, and the north of China is experiencing a drought. Yesterday afternoon, Xiao Long and I peered out of the windows at the overcast but less humid than usual grey skies and agreed that yu-shui did not look promising.

But, lo and behold, as I left the school board meeting last night at around 9.30, the ground was damp and the air was misted with light rain. The Lunar Calendar comes up trumps again! But maybe not enough - when I mentioned the rain to Xiao Long this morning she was derisive. "Call that rain!" she snorted, "it wasn't even tears! I can cry better than that!"

The Only Problem with Ganzi is Getting There

2009-02-09T11:05:00.006+08:00

This is what we decided after our third or fourth day in the car. It's always been that way so long as we have been visiting Ganzi. Once you are there, the sunshine, blue skies and radiant landscape give you such a lift that you forget about the tortuous roads, terrible toilets and thumping headache you have suffered along the way.

But really, I'm not sure what we were complaining about this time: we drove our own vehicle at our own pace and didn't suffer any major delays. Times were, we would sit on a bus for two or even three days waiting for yet another pile of dirt to be cleared off the road over Erlongshan. These days a 4 km tunnel cuts right through the middle of the mountain. Even though the road up to the tunnel is always fog-bound and gloomy, and at this time of year often icy, the weather on the other side is often completely different.

True to form, on this trip we sat around in a double-parked line of traffic, while cars ahead of us stopped in the middle of the road to put on chains, so they could crawl through the snow to reach the tunnel. Local men on motorbikes stand by the roadside with chains for hire. For 100 yuan they will fix them onto your wheels, then ride with you to the tunnel mouth and remove them. As we waited around on the narrow road, fitting in some snowball practice for the boys, I remembered many other long delays on this road, wondering how long I could hold out before climbing up or down the hillside to find a secluded toilet spot. At one point we even considered turning back, as it was nearly 5 pm and we did not want to spend the night on the mountain in the snow. But based on prior experience, we were fairly confident things would be different through the tunnel, and sure enough, once we made it out the other side the sun was shining, the road was clear and we cruised down the hill to Luding.

The trip to Ganzi is about to get even easier, as an airport is ready to open at the top of the Zhiduo mountain pass above Kangding. We drove past it on our way back, a long strip of tarmac stretched out along the rocky mountainside. I remembered a cold foggy hike along the same route 12 years ago, when we didn't see a single person all day, and pitched our tent in a spot that is probably now under the runway. The tourists are coming and I hope the people of Ganzi are ready for them. I fear that few are as prepared as the people of Jiaju.

They're coming: ready or not!

The Most Beautiful Village in China?

2009-02-08T21:09:00.012+08:00

Morning in Jiaju Village

Driving out of the Erlongshan Tunnel and down the steep mountain road that leads into Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, there are a series of large billboards advertising the tourist attractions of each county in the area. Jialong county, for example, proclaims itself the home of Sichuan Pepper, and has a vast picture of the ubiquitous little devils flowering on a bush. Isaac, who had eaten a whole one by mistake in a mouthful of vegetables the evening before, laughed out loud at that and said was one place he never wanted to go. But he did reflect that it would be a draw for most Sichuanese tourists.

Danba County, which was our first planned stop, has a picture of a hillside village with the area's famous stone towers and a sign proclaiming it "the most beautiful village
in China." When we eventually arrived in Danba the next day, we started to look for signs to the village of Jiaju where we had booked into a homestay. On a corkscrew bend of the mountain road we were directed to, we saw the same billboard with the same claim: apparently Jiaju is that village. My pictures don't really do it justice, but I think they have a strong argument.

Jiaju Village

On the recommendation of friends, we stayed at the home of Baosheng, who turned out to be the man responsible for the village's self-promotion. When he retired from his government job nine years ago he was asked to supervise tourism development and he has done a very thorough job. His major achievement must be the paved road that winds a tortuous 4 km from the valley floor up the steep mountainside to the village. Without it, very few visitors would ever reach Jiaju in the first place. I spent a long time puzzling over a similar village on the other side of the valley and wondering how the residents ever managed to leave home. Eventually I made out the faint zigzag line of a footpath twisting across the hillside, but I wouldn't have wanted to stop by there for tea.

When you reach the end of the impressive road to Jiaju, there is a gate and reception center and a formidable-looking man who asks for 30 yuan entrance fee per adult. We said we had booked to stay at Baosheng's place and he hesitated, but then said we had to pay anyway. Perhaps we could have argued around it, in the spirit of our budget-travel youth, but those days are gone: there we were in our large all-terrain vehicle and they had to pay for their road somehow. Later, as we sat on Baosheng's roof terrace drinking butter tea, he told us that five years of entrance fees had almost finished paying off the loans for the road. Up until now, 90% of the fees have gone to road upkeep and repayment, and the other 10% has been shared among the villagers, but from this year they will only need 50% for upkeep and can share out the other 50.

But Baosheng is concerned that they haven't yet figured out a fair way to share the profits among the villagers. He is certain that everyone should benefit from Jiaju's new identity as the most beautiful village in China, but not everyone participates to the same degree. About a dozen families have set up tourist homestays and others staff the gate or dress up in traditional clothes for photographs, but many don't want to get involved, or perhaps resent the intrusion. Baosheng wants everyone to be responsible for keeping the place tidy, for building clean toilets and for maintaining architectural traditions, but he hasn't yet figured out how to do it equitably. It's easy to imagine the kind of disputes that might arise, if someone wants to use their tourist income to build a modern house for example. Jiaju won't keep its label for long if that happens. Baosheng even apologized for the cement roof we were sitting on, saying that he knew it wasn't traditional, but it was very good at keeping the rain out. We agreed that it's possible to incorporate modern technology into traditional buildings and still preserve their beauty.

The homestay where we spent the night

These aren't unusual issues. Villages all over China, and many other parts of the world, are struggling with similar questions. The fact that the people of Jiaju are asking them, and that someone as capable and thoughtful as Baosheng is guiding the process, gives them real hope of figuring out manageable solutions. What is most impressive is that they are doing it themselves, by their own choice and with the active participation of most of the community.

Several small groups of tourists from Chengdu and Xi'an were also staying at Baosheng's place. It's a fairly intrepid type of Chinese tourist who chooses to spend their holiday driving around Ganzi instead of at home eating and setting off fireworks. It's a bit like a British family going on a road trip through eastern Europe over Christmas. These people were all friendly and pleasant. We exchanged travel stories and road news as we ate our dinner of many different varities of pork. The next morning one guy had to reverse his large car several hundred yards along a narrow muddy track in order to let us out, but you don't make it all the way from Xi'an to Jiaju in the first place to let that kind of maneuver faze you.

As we left, the women from Xi'an were up on the roof with Baosheng's daughters-in-law, giggling as they tried on Tibetan clothes and took each other's photos. The prettiest daughter in particular clearly loved this part, as there was an entire noticeboard of photos of her, presumably taken by guests and mailed back to the family. This was different from the bored women who stand around at tourist attractions with cameras and tired looking ethnic outfits, charging a lot of money to take dress-up pictures. Everyone was having a good time. I hope that continues to be the case for the villagers of Jiaju, and that they can hold onto their proud claim of being the most beautiful, without feeling they have given up too much.

Winter supplies of dried pork and corn at our homestay

Don't Get Used to It!

2009-02-06T12:14:00.005+08:00

"Don't get used to it - we've got to keep moving," was one of the catch-phrases of our recent road trip through western Sichuan, uttered by someone whenever we stopped to admire a view or play in the snow. It's a line from the film Bolt, in case you were wondering. Other lines from that film or from Wall-E provided a narrative for our trip. "Nothing real is real" was one of Sam's favourites, a little mangled from the original line, but highly appropriate for the Buddhist sentiments of the area; "that's one stuck melon" was another, apropos of nothing.

"Hey, I didn't know we had a pool" was top of my list, not just because we ended the trip soaking in the hot springs at Hailougou Glacier Park, but because we had escaped from the cloud-bound city, and our eyes were open the entire time to the astonishing beauty of the plateau.

Happy “Niu” Year

2009-02-06T11:11:00.000+08:00

Today is the 12th Day of the Year of the Ox, or niu in Chinese, hence the bad puns appearing everywhere. There is even a visual pun based around the shape of an ox’s head and the currency symbol for the Chinese yuan: wishing you lots of cash in the year ahead, a more than usually heartfelt wish, considering the shape of the world’s finances.

This year we stayed in Chengdu for the holiday itself, then set off on a road trip to the western part of Sichuan, the far eastern edge of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. More about that later. We choose to depart after the New Year because the few days before the holiday are a bad, bad time to travel; in fact a bad, bad time to go out of doors. I had to go to Carrefour the day before the holiday and it was a zoo. Everyone was shopping their socks off for holiday food and gifts to take home for family and friends, then cramming into cars, buses and trains to get home in time for the big celebration on New Year’s Eve.

Xiao Long and her extended family took the train back to their hometown, but were only able to buy 6 seats between 17 people, so most of them had to stand or perch in the aisle. This wouldn’t have been so bad if the journey had only taken 6 hours as scheduled, but delays added another 11 hours to their travel time, and they didn’t reach home until 3 am the following morning. Xiao Long said the train was so full that you couldn’t even use the toilets: all the cubicles were full of passengers who couldn’t find any other space to stand in.

Meanwhile, in the city, orange tents had appeared on every street corner selling fireworks of every size, shape and possible description. Two years ago when we stayed around for the New Year, fireworks were only sold outside the city limits, but apparently they have been allowed to move into town on the grounds that letting off fireworks is a Chinese cultural tradition. It is a tradition that every man, woman and child indulged in this year, judging from the nightly spectacle visible, and audible, from every corner of our apartment. I have seen many fireworks displays on Bonfire Night in the UK, and on the 4th of July in the USA, but even the display put on over Manhattan only lasts 20 minutes. Here they go on all night, for around 2 weeks. On New Year’s Eve there were multiple fireworks displays throughout the city for hours and hours, culminating in a frenzy of explosions around midnight. It was amazingly beautiful and a lot of fun, but you can only watch the same types of fizz-bang coloured lights for so long and after a while we grew blasé and watched a movie instead. However, there was no getting way from the noise, or the smell.

The next day the ground of our compound was littered with ash and dead fireworks. One chubby ten-year old boy we met playing outside commented that the marble-floored stage area usually used for rollerblading and bike-riding was so dirty you could play baseball on it. Then he calmly took a cigarette lighter and a bunch of firecrackers out of his pocket and started lighting them and throwing them into the ornamental pond. The attitude towards firework safety is different from what I am used to. All the orange tents bear signs saying that fireworks must be let off at least 10 metres away, but no-one takes any notice. Under the cultural park underpass, a couple of guys were buying rockets from an orange tent, then crouching down to let them off on the busy street corner a few feet away, with vehicles passing in four directions. They explained that the rockets were sending all of their misfortune from the past year up into space, clearing the way for better luck in the coming year. Fair enough, but it would have been really bad luck if one had veered off into the path of an oncoming vehicle, or worse, into the back of the orange tent.

On the second day of the New Year, when the roads were quiet because most people were at home eating, or visiting friends and relatives nearby, we set off on our trip. As we were packing up the car at the entrance to our compound, three children were setting off firecrackers and little rockets in the gateway, where cars come in and out. I judged the children to be aged 6, 7 and 9. There was no adult with them, so they were lighting them by themselves, then rushing off to the orange tent on the corner to buy more. The gate guards looked on indulgently and cheered when each one went off. In my mind, the potential for horrible accidents was so great I could hardly watch them, but perhaps I just don’t get it. Probably the parents of those children would have considered us irresponsible if they had known we were packing up our car to set off over icy roads and mountain passes for a holiday at 4,200 metres above sea-level.

To Shop is Patriotic

2009-01-14T14:44:00.000+08:00

Early in December Ethan and I went to Beijing for a couple of days. Ethan had been invited to speak at a conference organized by the National Poverty Alleviation Bureau to celebrate 30 years of Gaige Kaifeng (Reform and Opening), the policy initiated by Deng Xiao-ping in 1978 that launched China’s economic transformation.

I love going to Beijing because it brings back memories of the year I spent as a student there at the People’s University in 1985-86. Much as I love Chengdu, Beijing was my first home in China and I am very fond of the city. Of course, these days it is barely recognizable from the low-rise, ramshackle communist capital it was back then. These days I completely loose my bearings among the vast, glittering boulevards of hotels and luxury brand shopping malls, but the moment I can turn down a side-street thronged with busy Beijingers and bicycles, I know where I am again.

The conference was a surprise. We were expecting a programme of predictable, tedious speeches from government officials congratulating themselves on their success in fighting poverty. That was exactly how things started, but after 4 or 5 men in suits had read out bombastic statements of that type, an elderly man with a long wisp of a Confucian beard took the stage and turned it all upside down. He delivered a speech in the quavering tones of Chinese opera, which grabbed the attention the students, NGO workers and government officials in the audience. I wish I could have understood all of it, but his main point was that the whole world is inter-connected and China forgets this at its peril. No matter how much China has achieved over the past 30 years, the country cannot rest on its laurels, not just because of the poverty remaining in China but the rest of the world as well. He talked at length about the current economic crisis and warned against Chinese people taking any satisfaction in America’s woes. He said that if America suffers, China will suffer as well and it is China’s duty to save America! Now that China is poised to become the world’s economic powerhouse it has a responsibility for the economic health of all countries, not just its own people. He was making a very serious point, contradicting the schadenfreude that has pervaded much of the commentary about the crisis, and his humorous delivery ensured that the audience really took notice.

We were impressed, and went on to be equally impressed by several of the speakers in the next session, who were senior academics from universities and government research offices. A couple gave predictable, boring addresses but three or four stood up and delivered thoughtful talks in an engaging manner.

One reiterated the theme of inter-connection, argued for policies supporting rural enterprises and emphasized the need for education, in particular for the system to allow greater creativity. His most memorable line, echoing Deng Xiao-ping’s famous “To get rich is glorious”, was “To shop is patriotic”, and he exhorted the audience to get out there and spend money to support China’s manufacturing industries. I feel well-equipped to go along with that one.

The speakers contradicted each other with enthusiasm. The next man took issue with the education argument, asking how it would be paid for, and said he was opposed to solving problems by formulating new policies. He argued that 80% of rural households in China are still primarily agricultural, only 20% are running small businesses, so the problems they face are related to farming or livestock management, not business development.

Another speaker contradicted the elderly man who had started the day, by saying it is impossible for China to save America, just as it is impossible for China to solve its poverty problem in the short term, because it is a long-term problem with complex historical roots. For example, the pro-urban strategy that has been employed over the years, such as controlling the price of grain to benefit city dwellers while penalizing the farmers. Yet another took this line further, explaining how all his life he had studied and believed socialist economic principles based on the Soviet model, but his observations had led him to realize they were incorrect and the only solution for building wealth was to allow free markets. He said it was a mistaken assumption that market economics neglect the poor, how could this be true when so many people have been lifted out of poverty since economic reforms began in China, but that more market freedom was necessary, such as lifting controls on grain prices to benefit poor farmers.

Later in the day there were plenty of tedious speakers, mostly giving presentations of the “ten points about poverty alleviation in such and such a county” variety. Several used power point, but in a way that made their talks even more soporific, by presenting huge blocks of tiny Chinese text on each slide and reading them out on a monotone. Ethan’s presentation gave the perspective of a ‘lao-wai’ (foreigner) on 30 years of reform and opening, as he has been coming to China for 27 of those years. He had put a lot of time into preparing his speech in Chinese and it was well-received.

The conference did include a good deal of self-congratulation, and not without good reason. Part of the purpose was to celebrate the successes of the past 30 years, during which time more people have been lifted out of poverty than at any other time in human history. But coming back to Beijing 23 years after I first arrived there as a student, what was most compelling to me was the way the speakers critiqued policy failings and openly discussed problems that are as yet unsolved. That really represents reform and opening.

November Update

2008-11-25T12:18:00.002+08:00

I haven’t posted anything since shortly after the earthquake, because we were travelling all summer and I’ve been too busy or lazy since then. We visited family and friends in Europe and the US, and enjoyed being away from the aftershocks for a couple of months and losing that dizzy feeling. All apart from one moment at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, California, where Isaac built an earthquake-proof structure out of wooden blocks, then pressed a button to simulate an earthquake. The sound of the table shaking and the blocks tumbling down really unsettled me and I wondered for a moment if I really wanted to come back.

We did of course and there continue to be aftershocks even now, but we’ve only really noticed a couple. One at 11 pm on a Friday night sent me scurrying to repack an emergency bag and make sure all our papers were in order, just in case we have to do a runner. That momentary sensation of instability brings everything back.

That 11 pm aftershock was the first experience of earth movement for Xiao Long’s husband Zeng Jun, as he was away for most of this year and missed the earthquake. Apparently when he felt the tremor, he jumped up and tried to rush the family out of the building, but they all laughed at him and told him to sit down – this was nothing compared to the real event. Of course any of us would have reacted the same way as he did if one of those rattling moments had happened a year ago, but it’s all relative. I gather that’s how Californians feel, they just get used to it.

Zeng Jun just returned to Chengdu from a city near Tianjin in the north of China, where he has been running a hotpot restaurant since April. This was a new business venture after he decided to sell his car: at a big loss, much to Xiao Long’s annoyance. Originally he planned to open a hotpot place in Chengdu, but after making a down payment to rent somewhere, he found out the building was scheduled for demolition, so he decided to head north, where he has an uncle and a few army buddies. He and Xiao Long ran a restaurant successfully up there for a few years when they were first married. It is incredible how quickly people make these decisions here and how quickly they act. Within a week of arriving he had rented a place, hired some staff and was serving customers, making about 200 yuan profit per day. It was hard work though. He and a buddy worked around the clock, 7 days a week: shopping for the food, doing all the cooking and cleaning up at the end of the day.

Xiao Long took their daughter Zeng Jing to visit him in the summer, but it doesn’t sound like they had a very good time. She said the place was dirty and ugly and too hot, and Zeng Jun was living in a dormitory with minimal facilities. He really missed home and every day was a grind. Millions of people all over China are living that way in order to support their families and improve their lives. At least he was running his own business, not working at a factory or construction site where he could lose his job at any moment. But in the end he did lose, due to a stroke of extremely bad luck. One night a drunken customer picked a fight about paying for his meal and punched Zeng Jun, threatening to come back and beat him up properly. After that Zeng Jun lost heart. He was afraid the guy would follow through with his threat, or else find some way to close him down. As Zeng Jun was not a local and didn’t have good contacts it would be difficult for him to argue his case if trouble occurred. So in early November, he packed up and came home with nothing to show for his hard work. Because he broke the lease on the restaurant he ended up losing money, about 20,000 yuan, a big hit for the family finances. He arrived home with 200 yuan in his pocket.

Xiao Long took it well overall as she and Zeng Jing were happy to have him home. Zeng Jun was over the moon to be back with his family, able to sleep in a comfortable bed and be looked after by his wife and sister. His older sister Xiao Zeng and her husband and son have been occupying one room of familyy’s small apartment since the earthquake. With the family matriarch joining them as well every other week it’s a tight squeeze, but it means there’s always someone to look after the two kids, and the cousins are growing up more like brother and sister, an advantage in a one-child family society.

For a couple of weeks Zeng Jun celebrated his homecoming, inviting his relatives and army buddies over. One night he and his friends stayed up all night and polished off 5 bottles of baijiu (like vodka but stronger). Xiao Long said she had to mop the floor 4 times to clean up all the sticky mess from spilled toasts. But Zeng Jun knew he couldn’t sit around forever. It’s a stretch for the family to manage on Xiao Long’s salary even though we recently gave her a large raise. She now earns 1750 a month, compared to 700 when she started working for us 3 and a half years ago. That raise is roughly consistent with the cost of living: local families were paying 600 to a full-time live-in ayi when we arrived and now they are paying 1200. The cost of everything has risen, and in the meantime exchange rates have plummeted, from 8.2 to the US$ to 6.8 and from 15 to the pound to less than 11, so our spending power has really declined.

Xiao Long announced that she was going to buy a bicycle and let her husband use her electric bike to look for work. I said we would buy her the bicycle as a Christmas present and we got her a nice one at Decathlon, but it’s a long and often cold 50 minute trek to and from work. When I pointed out that in her family the women were the main breadwinners, as well as looking after the home and children, she defended her husband and said that he had been unlucky the past few years, but up until then he had done pretty well. He used to earn 5,000 a month driving a taxi, but because he isn’t a Chengdu resident, he can only drive someone else’s cab on the night shift and they both agree that’s too dangerous and tough on family life to start doing again.

Then a few days ago Xiao Long reported that Zeng Jun had earned 200 yuan the previous night. When I asked what he was doing, she shrugged and said “That’s his business. I don’t ask, I don’t want to know.” This makes it sound shadier than it probably is - most likely he’s operating her motorbike as an informal, illegal taxi, ferrying goods and people around the city after dark. It’s all OK with her as long as it keeps the family moving onwards and upwards.

Speaking of upward mobility, Xiao Long has to go to school for a parents’ meeting tomorrow, a meeting with the principal for a select group of the best students, to talk about options for middle school. Zeng Jing warned her mother that she would probably be called up on stage because Zeng Jing is doing so well in school, so Xiao Long is dreading the meeting. I thought she might have been happy to be commended in this way, but she says it’s embarrassing. The principal is not so much praising them as using them to criticize everyone else. Soon after they moved to Chengdu they were called up in front of the whole school because Zeng Jing’s grades had improved from mediocre when she first arrived, to near the top of the class. The principal harangued the other parents, asking if a girl from the countryside could do so well, why couldn’t their children who grew up in Chengdu? She managed to make everyone feel bad: Zeng Jing and her parents for being poor peasants from the countryside whom no-one expects much of, and everyone else for being outshone by them.

This kind of public shaming technique is an everyday part of the education system. The good students are constantly praised and held up as examples and given more attention, while the bad students are berated. The ten students with the lowest grades in each class at the end of the month are made to stay behind after school for an extra 50 minute class every day, where they teacher supervises their homework and lectures them about falling behind. Despite growing up with this approach, Xiao Long thinks it’s ineffectual. The bad students just get used to thinking of themselves as hopeless and give up. They’re only 10 years old but they’re already clear about where they’re going and it isn’t very far. I wonder what will happen to them, but I also wonder how Zeng Jing and the other kids who are tipped to succeed will meet the expectations everyone has of them.

Relief and Beliefs

2008-05-29T14:51:00.003+08:00

Here is a great story from the blog ‘bezdomny ex patria’, which translates a newspaper account of Shandong peasants’ contribution to earthquake relief efforts:

“On the map it’s only 25 centimetres as the crow flies, not far, let’s go!” At around 1 am on the 14th, after an “Urgent Meeting to Analyse the Feasibility of Going to Sichuan for Disaster Relief”, 10 residents of Dongzaohu Village, Luohe Township, Ying County, Shandong, carrying 50 kg of Shandong pancakes, driving an agricultural tricycle, jolted their way for four days and three nights over 3000 km, finally reaching Sichuan to take part in the earthquake relief.”

Although this is a lovely story, it is news items like this that make it difficult for me to watch the tv news here. Everything, whether it is an uplifting story of rescue or a crushing one of loss, makes me cry. Even waiting in the bank I can’t look at the big screen tv tuned into the news channel without feeling myself tear up. Almost every story has an emotional pull.

Here is my adaptation of a translated poem that is circulating on the internet and may be made into an earthquake memorial song. It is unashamedly syrupy, but even this I can’t read without choking up.

"Hurry child, take Mummy's hand": for the children who died in the earthquake

Hurry child, take Mummy's hand.
The way to heaven is too dark
and Mummy is afraid you'll hit your head.
Hurry, hold Mummy's hand tight -
Let me go with you.

Mummy, I'm scared.
The road to heaven is too dark.
I can't see your hand
Since the falling walls stole the sunshine away.
I will never see your loving gaze again.

Go child, the road ahead
Will have no more sadness,
No endless homework, or your father's scolding.
You must remember Daddy's face and mine,
In the next life we will walk together again

Mummy don't worry.
The road to heaven is crowded.
There are many classmates and friends.
We say do not weep, do not weep,
Anyone's mother is our mother now,
Any child is your child.
In the days ahead without me,
Please give your love to the children who are still alive.

Mummy don't cry,
Tears won't light our road.
Let us go slowly on our way.
Mummy I'll remember Daddy and your faces
I'll remember our promise,
In the next life to walk together again.

You can read the stories behind this poem in the New York Times, which has several revealing articles about schools that collapsed, killing up to 10,000 children.

It is incredible to witness the national outpouring of emotion that the earthquake has released. I ♥ China t-shirts are everywhere. National pride was running very high anyway, as a result of the protests in Tibetan areas and then the Olympic Torch Rally controversy, but the earthquake has taken it to another level. It has also, generally speaking, given the nationalistic feelings a more positive turn. The focus has moved from anger against perceived injustices by the international community, to an outpouring of brotherly love and support for those affected by the disaster. It appears to be true in the world at large also, that detailed media coverage of events, and especially the human stories of bereavement, have given people new insight into and sympathy for China.

Within China, many people have translated their feelings into action. They are turning out in large numbers to help with the relief effort, many travelling across the country to try and contribute. Whether it’s a group of Shandong peasants with a tricycle-load of pancakes or a psychiatrist from Guangzhou on a mountain bike, everyone has a genuine desire to do what they can. Even the generally self-absorbed, BMW-driving middle classes of Chengdu are getting involved, if the piles of donated blankets and supplies at the gate of our compound last week are anything to go by.

The centre of the ex-pat relief effort in Chengdu is the Bookworm cafe, where a group of people have set up Sichuan Quake Relief to assist the relief operation. Please visit this site to see what they are doing and how you can help. Our friend Jonny Dallas joined a convoy of trucks from the Bookworm that went up to Longmenshan on Saturday. He said they visited about 20 villages to distribute supplies and collect information. Depending on the ability and connections of the village leaders, some were well set-up with orderly camps and enough bottled water to last a month, while others had nothing. I’ll be working with the Chengdu International Women’s Club over the next months to raise money for a specific charity, and I’ll post more about that as it develops. Ethan is also thinking about the longer term scenario and how Winrock may be able to assist in the reconstruction effort.

The first half of 2008 has been difficult for China, and many people are finding symmetry in the string of disasters. I heard from several sources this week that the number 8 provides a connection between all the things that have happened. The winter snowstorms that caused such havoc started on the 25th of January: 1-25 (1+2+5=8), the Lhasa riots began on the 14th of March (3-14) and the earthquake occurred on the 12th of May (5-12). Not only that, they are saying that the death toll could rise as high as 80,000 people. The author of the blog Barking at the Sun takes this further, pointing out that between 12th May and 8th August there are 88 days, and that some people claim 2008 is a cursed year, just as 1998 and 1988 (not sure why) and 1978 (the year of Mao’s death) were before it.

I haven’t heard any coherent explanation for the unlucky 8, which is usually a lucky number in China, much as 7 is in the west, but people are saying we should all be careful on the 2nd of June, not to mention the 11th of June, oh and the 1st of July and the 10th of July….then that’s it for the rest of the year, thank goodness. Unless of course the 8th of August 2008 comes into play, and let’s hope not because the Olympic Games are scheduled to open on that date, at 8:08 precisely.

The other superstition doing the rounds connects the various disasters to the Olympic mascots. Jingjing, the panda mascot, relates to Sichuan Province, home of pandas and the site of the earthquake. The Tibetan antelope mascot, Yingying, represents the unrest that occurred in Tibetan areas earlier in the year. The flame-haired mascot Huanhuan is the Olympic torch and so is obviously connected to the protests that dogged its progress around the world. The swallow mascot, Nini, is somewhat tenuously linked to the city of Weifang in Shandong, the home of kite-flying, where a fatal train crash occurred last month. I have heard that Beibei the sturgeon fish mascot has been linked to the snowstorm disaster, but others say it is connected to the Yangtse river or to the Olympic games themselves, and to a 5th disaster yet to come.

AFP quotes a geomancer from Hong Kong claiming that, according to Chinese astrological charts, 2008, the Year of the Rat on the Chinese lunar calendar, was destined to be one of tumult and disaster."This is a year of earth and water, it means the earth is unstable and water is very powerful," he said. Hence the snowstorms and the earthquakes, though no explanation for everything else.

I first heard about the 5 mascots from my friend Ingrid and, the way she told it, Beibei represents the snowstorms and therefore the disasters are all over and done with. In fact she maintains that 5 good things will happen in China in the second half of the year! We had some fun speculating about what they might be, depending on your point of view. Let’s hope things take a turn for the better, anyway, because people could really use a break around here.

Panic in the City

2008-05-29T14:39:00.001+08:00

We had another aftershock scare yesterday afternoon. Isaac arrived home from school, closely followed by Xiao Long, who announced that everyone was outside again and a large aftershock – a magnitude 7.0 - was predicted to occur between 1 and 4 pm. “Even the babies are outside, all lined up out there under the trees,” she said, clearly alarmed. Also she had heard that schools and government offices in the town of Mianyang, near the epicenter of the original quake, had been closed since 11 am.

I looked at my watch. It was already 3 pm and I knew, logically, that aftershocks cannot be predicted and that so far all such panics have turned out to be false alarms. But then Sam said, “Mummy hurry up and go outside, my house is going to make a big noise.” That drew me up short. Most likely he had heard Xiao Long talking outside, but to describe it in those terms means that he must also remember the original earthquake. He has not been noticeably upset by events, apart from all the moving around in the first few days, but he obviously retains a memory. “My house making a big noise” is a pretty accurate description of his experience, lying down on the floor with me clutching him and Xiao Long calling “don’t worry baby it’s going to be OK” round the edge of the bed, while everything rattled and shook all around him.

His comment made me think that there was no harm in going outside for an hour or so. Unfortunately Isaac had other ideas. He had just got home from school and was tired. He has a cough and had woken up at 5 am, so now he just wanted to sit on the sofa and read his book. When I said let’s go outside, he rolled his eyes and said, “Mummy, you know they can’t predict earthquakes.” But with Xiao Long urging us to hurry up and leave, and Sam running round in circles saying the house was about to make a big noise, I insisted he come with us. A friend texted the news that Isaac’s Taekwondo class was cancelled because of the shake rumours. Xiao Liu wanted to finish making the beds but Xiao Long told her not to be so silly and to come along quickly. Isaac took so long putting on his shoes that, regrettably, I shouted at him to hurry up and he burst into tears. By the time we got outside we were all upset.

Once outside, it appeared that Xiao Long had exaggerated somewhat. There were a lot of people, some clutching quilts and bags of water and snacks, and it sounded like the roads were busy as well, but it was far calmer than during earlier alarms of this kind. I suggested that we get ice-cream from the shop, which restored everyone’s good humour. Sam smeared chocolate cornetto all over himself while Isaac and I sat on a bench and did his homework. Xiao Liu kept looking at her watch and after a while she said she would go back upstairs and do the ironing. I realized that she was right and there was no good reason to be outside. Ethan forwarded a text that said, “The National and Provincial Earthquake Bureaus have not predicted a magnitude 7.0 aftershock in Sichuan. Please do not spread rumours.” So we all traipsed back upstairs again.

This morning Xiao Long told me that the real reason schools and offices were closed in Mianyang was to practice evacuation in case of flooding from damaged dams, a much greater threat to safety than aftershocks. But, despite knowing that any aftershocks are going to be smaller than the original earthquake and therefore will not cause any great damage, it is still difficult to resist the urge to run away from possible danger.

I find something similar happens to me most nights. I wake up around dawn and feel a slight tremour, usually only lasting a couple of seconds. Maybe I even imagine it, although very likely not, as they are happening all the time. Then I am gripped by panic, my heart racing, as I imagine the building crashing down on top of us all, and wonder whether I should wake everyone up and rush them outside. I imagine us racing out of the door just in time, as apartment buildings collapse all around us. I manage to control the urge to run, but I find myself listening carefully to the noises outside for possible danger signals. Are the birds still singing? Are a lot of dogs barking? Are other people outside already?

This may sound ridiculous but apparently it is a very normal ‘flight’ response, a typical symptom of anxiety following a traumatic event. Several of my friends are experiencing similar feelings. Many of us also feel dizzy a lot of the time, which I attribute again to the constant tiny aftershocks, too small to register an actual feeling of movement, but still affecting the inner ear. My friend Cyndi, who has now joined her husband in the US, said in an email that she no longer feels the dizziness now she has left China.

Here is a link to a New York Times Article that describes the atmosphere of panic in Chengdu: Although I have to say things feel a lot closer to normal here now than he describes them.

Also this blog, ‘Barking at the Sun’, has good descriptions and a thorough debunking of the aftershock rumours.

After the Earthquake

2008-05-22T15:43:00.005+08:00

Thank-you so much to everyone who has emailed or called to find out how we are. Here is the story of our lives over the past week, in case you have the time and inclination to read a blow-by-blow account.

I was in the bathroom when an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale struck at 2:28 local time last Monday. When the door started rattling I thought at first that our two-year old Sam must be trying to come in. Then I opened the door and realized that the whole building was shaking. Sam’s nanny Long Xiao-yan and our cleaning lady Liu Ying ran towards me, shouting that we should leave but, remembering instructions from the British Consulate, I told them to lie on the floor instead. We huddled down beside the bed and I lay clutching Sam as the building shook vigorously for 3 minutes. With the epicentre less than 100 miles to the north-west we experienced extreme shaking, and were lucky that there was not more damage, for a variety of reasons I found out later.

I remember thinking that we were in the wrong room, right on the outside of the building, but I couldn’t move. Horror stories of women in the Tangshan earthquake watching their children disappear in front of them, from Xinran’s book The Good Women of China, ran through my mind. As the shaking slowed down I said let’s go, and we ran for the door. We didn’t stop to pick up bags or phones or to lock the door, or even to put on shoes. We joined the stream of neighbours pouring down the stairs and the crowd milling about on the grass outside. Leaving the building with Sam in my arms I began to tremble and cry, as I realized what we had just experienced.

People were wandering about in a daze, many half-dressed or wearing pyjamas. Everyone who had a phone was frantically trying to dial family members, but all the circuits were down and no calls could go through. I remembered my friend Cyndi who lives on the 18th floor of one of the high-rise blocks on our compound. Running around the corner I met her coming the other way in tears. The quake had felt even more extreme at her level, and she had fled her apartment with her 5 month-old baby daughter, her 3 year old son and their nanny, as light fixtures shattered overhead. Looking back on it, she now says she can’t even remember the trip down 18 flights of stairs.

One’s first thoughts are for the rest of the family. I was confident Isaac would be safe at his school, which is a new, 3-storey building, but I was concerned about Ethan, whose 6th floor office is in a building that has seen better days. But with no communication possible, there was nothing to do but wait. Our small group headed to the entrance of the housing complex and set up a base on the grass outside the gate, where we hoped the school bus would eventually deliver the older children.

We spent a fretful afternoon there, waiting and trying to gather information. Cyndi had no choice but to climb back up 18 flights of stairs to fetch formula and nappies for the baby, and she brought drinks and snacks back with her. Her daughter Maggie arrived safely in the car and thankfully Ethan arrived on his bike at about 4 o’clock. He had run from his building, which was still shaking as he got outside, but there was no damage. The school bus finally delivered Isaac at about 5:30, an hour and a half late because the streets were clogged with traffic as everyone tried to get home to check on their families, or to leave the city. Isaac had been outside on the playground having a PE lesson when the quake struck, and his teachers had reacted very calmly, so he was not scared at all, rather excited by the whole experience. With the family back together again our attention turned to what to do next. Cyndi and I walked to the nearby shopping centre to look for food. It was closed, but we managed to buy a case of water and ice-creams for everyone.

Back at the compound our neighbours were starting to set up tents for the night, but we decided to first check on friends who live nearby. I rode my bike 10 minutes to their housing complex, China Gardens, and found a small tent city had grown up around the fountain. A group of our friends were there, bottles of wine were being opened and the atmosphere was supportive and relieved as everyone exchanged news and experiences. When I reported back to Ethan and Cyndi we decided to move there too. Several people in China Gardens, including our friends Kim and Jonny Dallas, have houses with ground-floor access and their water had not been cut off as ours had. Cyndi and I walked over with the children, and Ethan went back to the flat to dig out camping equipment. It took him a long time to do this because, as the lines opened up again, the telephone rang off the hook with people enquiring for our safety. Luckily my sister Helen managed to get through from Scotland, so she was able to spread the news around the family that we were safe.

It was dark by the time we set up camp at China Gardens. The children were happy to see their friends and it was helpful to be with a group of other people. Thankfully it was a warm night and we all sat up talking about what had happened and trying to find out more news. Ethan had brought 3 tents so we were able to lend 2 to friends, including 1 to my friend Louise, who was on her own with her 2 young children. Her husband Zhang Shao-hong was in Lhasa, having been part of the team who carried the Olympic torch to the top of Mount Everest. Ethan had a radio and intermittent internet access, so were gradually able to piece the story together. We heard that a school had collapsed and 4 children had died, but at that early stage we had no idea of the extent of the devastation so close by.

Nobody slept much that night. Ethan’s contact information is apparently on a website of NGOs in China, so he started to receive phone calls from media organizations. Throughout the night he took calls from NBC, ABC, the BBC and Good Morning America. The BBC used part of the call in an interview the next day, which was helpful as many of our friends in the UK heard it and knew we were OK. Several of the other networks lost interest when they heard that we were unhurt and had not witnessed death or destruction. Good Morning America called 3 or 4 times through the night and asked Ethan if he would interview other people and take video footage of the scene. They arranged to call again at 6 pm the next day to interview him for the programme but, having kept us awake all night, they never called back.

Towards dawn it began to rain. People closed up their tents or huddled under umbrellas and tried to get some sleep. The rain grew heavier and did not stop for the next 24 hours. It was only an inconvenience for us, but it greatly hampered rescue efforts and increased the misery of those trapped in the earthquake zone. We spent Tuesday either in our tent or at the homes of various friends. Kim and Jonny set up a base camp on their ground floor which became a haven for several castaways from high-rise buildings like us. Traci Perdue and Michael Shelton, another China Gardens family, also gave us shelter that day and dinner in the evening.

Our friends Ingrid and Paddy Booz live on the 13th floor of a building that they already knew did not comply with building codes. They experienced violent shaking and a frightening departure from their building, Ingrid still in her pjs, and when Paddy returned later to fetch clothes, he found a great deal of breakages and buckled floors. They had set off to walk across the city to locate their children and their visitors from Sweden, but ended up buying bikes and riding instead. Having reunited their family they were also based at China Gardens. By some miracle Louise’s husband managed to get on a flight from Lhasa to Chengdu on Tuesday morning and joined his family, although, after 6 weeks sleeping in a tent on Mount Everest, all he wanted to do was go home, and he was not thrilled at the prospect of a night camping out in the rain.

We stayed in China Gardens for the rest of the week, spending more time each day back at our own apartment sorting things out. The skies cleared on Wednesday morning and we were able to dry everything out. That was the first day we went home for more than a few minutes. I spent an hour cleaning the glass from the kitchen floor. A large glass bowl and a couple of beer bottles had smashed and the beer had glued the broken glass onto the floor, so the shards had to be pried up one by one. Apart from that the only noticeable impact was that a heavy bookcase in the study had jumped about 10 inches away from the wall, which now has a long crack in the plaster running down it. Strangely nothing else in the study moved, not even a teapot on a table right next to the bookcase.

That afternoon, Ethan went out looking for water, as his early prediction about water shortages had proved correct. This was the first major panic to take hold of the city, when stories began to circulate that leaks at chemical plants near Wenchuan had contaminated the water supply with ammonia. Amid rumours that the water would be cut off for up to a week, people filled their bathtubs and basins, and rushed to buy up bottled water. By the time Ethan went out shopping, the shelves were bare. At the local wholesale market, police officers were keeping the crowds under control and limiting purchases to one case of drinks per person. Paddy saw a westerner attempting to photograph the scenes of panic in a convenience store being apprehended by irate shoppers, who deleted the pictures from his camera. Ethan came home with a box of sports drink and we filled every container in the house with tap water. At that point I began to lose heart and got on the phone to my travel agent to enquire about tickets. I managed to book flights to Hong Kong for Friday morning for all of us, and got in touch with my friend Ruth, who welcomed us to come and stay.

Later that night the two major telephone companies circulated text messages from the city government, stating that the water supply was safe and sufficient and there was no danger of it being cut off. As the days passed, the government got better at keeping up with the stories and quashing them before panic spreads. It is clear that the response to perceived danger is potentially as big a threat to public safety as any real event. Other rumours have concerned fuel shortages, the spread of disease from the disaster area, the possibility of flooding from unstable dams and of radiation poisoning from nuclear facilities in the disaster region. Despite all of these concerns, I was beginning to feel better about the situation by the end of the week, and decided not to go to Hong Kong. Ethan could not leave because of his work and it felt more important to stay together and try to get back into a routine.

The fear that has loomed largest is that of aftershocks, which continue to shake the city every day. In fact I just had to stop writing for a few minutes because I felt the room shaking again. There have been thousands of these since last Monday, more than more than 150 of them significant. The biggest, measuring 5.7, occurred at 1:08 on Sunday morning, ironically the first night that we spent back at home. Although we were exhausted and sleeping deeply at the time, Ethan and I both leaped out of bed as soon as the tremor began, but by the time we reached the boys’ rooms the shaking had stopped. The boys didn’t even stir. We turned on the television for a while and texted a few friends to see if they were OK. There was a burning smell outside and acrid orange smoke drifting on the air, but before long a thunderstorm started, which seemed to deal with whatever the problem was. We thought about moving back to the tent but, contemplating the torrential rain, we went back to bed.

On Sunday the city government circulated a text message stating, “the Chengdu plain is not in the aftershock region. City residents should be assured that aftershocks will not cause destruction in the Chengdu area.” Although this sounded like good sense, it did not prevent the panic that took hold of the city the following day. On Monday night, provincial television issued warnings that an aftershock of between 6.0 and 7.0 was expected in the next few days. People interpreted this as meaning their homes were not safe, and before long Chengdu was in a greater state of agitation than it had been after the actual event.

From 10:30 pm that night the city was in chaos, as people rushed out of their homes and prepared to spend the night outside. At 11.00 I received an alarmed call from Laura, an American neighbour, telling me to please believe her and just get out of the house as quickly as possible. Ethan was out looking for water again, so I woke up the boys and hustled them down the stairs in the dark. Ethan found us sitting on a bench, Isaac comatose and Sam crying that he wanted to go home. Before long Cyndi joined us. Luckily her nanny had stayed the night to help her in just such an eventuality, so between them they was able to get all the children out of the building. We all stood around in our pajamas wondering what to do. The streets were jammed with traffic and the air was filled with the blaring of horns. Phone-lines were blocked as people frantically texted and called their loved-ones. We were tempted to go home to bed, but it is hard to fight the herd instinct. Everyone else was heading out, carrying bedding and food supplies for the night, preparing to sleep in the one-storey management building or to set up camp in the gardens. In the end, Cyndi went to stay at Kim and Jonny’s house and we set up our tent again.

In an attempt to understand what is going on, Ethan has been in contact with his classmate Lind Gee of the US Geological Survey’s Albuquerque Seismological Laboratory. She explained that aftershocks typically go on for a while, their magnitude decreasing with time, and that the Sichuan earthquake appeared to be following that pattern. But she also said that there is often a largish event late in the sequence: “The general rule of thumb is that the largest aftershock will be one magnitude unit lower than the main shock,” meaning that we can still expect a 6.9 shock to come. The scientific consensus is that it is not possible to predict when this will happen or exactly where on the fault, but most people here are not taking any chances. After living through the past week, and especially having seen so many disturbing images of devastation on television, I share their anxiety. Rather than dissipating, the nervousness seems to be worse this week than last week, when we were all running on adrenalin.

Among my neighbours, there is a wide range of responses to the aftershocks. One couple on the 7th floor of our building, Mr and Mrs Wang, have slept in their apartment since the day of the earthquake. Mrs Wang told me they were confident to sleep at home because this housing complex is well-constructed, and if our building falls down then the whole city will be in ruins, an observation that I do not find especially reassuring. By contrast, Liu Rui-jun, another 7th floor neighbour, camped outside all week with his wife and son. When I bumped into him on the stairs he explained, somewhat defensively, that they enjoy sleeping in a tent and often go camping on holiday.

Peoples’ responses depend partly on their experience of the original shock. Those were inside a high-rise building are more affected than those who were outside at the time. Three days after Monday’s panic, the school are closed and many are still sleeping outside, despite repeated attempts by the city government to calm the situation. Broadcasts on provincial television explaining that Chengdu will not be seriously affected by any aftershocks have not reassured all residents. Sam's nanny Long Xiao-yan and her 11-member extended family were still sleeping in makeshift shelters on Tuesday night, despite heavy rain. “We have heard that there could be another earthquake even larger than the first one, or a big aftershock closer to Chengdu, so we don’t want to take any chances,” she explained. She also told me that the horrific Tangshan earthquake that killed a quarter of a million people was preceded by a minor shock a month or so earlier. People are afraid that the same thing might happen here, although this doesn’t really make sense, considering that a major shock has already occurred, just not right here. Which reminds me of why Chengdu was not affected too badly: an earthquake can only occur on a fault, of course, and Chengdu is not on the fault, although this quake occurred about as close to Chengdu on the fault as possible. Also, the city is on a flood plain, built on earth, whereas the cities closer to the fault are built on rock, which moved more when the fault shifted. The shock also moved in one direction here, so that buildings absorbed it more easily, whereas closer to the epicenter there was shaking back and forth.

Three days later there are still makeshift camps all over the city. But only the relatively well-off have the luxury of camping equipment. In poorer sections of the city, people are sleeping out in the open or under makeshift tarpaulins and theft has become a problem. One day I spoke to a woman who works at Intel, who had come to borrow a tent from the Dallas family. She had spent the week sleeping in the car with her three-week old baby. According to Chinese tradition, mother and baby should not leave the house for the first month after birth. When I asked her about this, she could not hold back tears as she described trying to care for her baby in the back seat of the car, with her mother in the front and her husband and father sleeping on the pavement outside.

But even as they cope with their own difficulties, the people of Chengdu feel overwhelmingly lucky to have escaped so lightly. The inconvenience of sleeping outside in the rain, or not having a working elevator is put into daily perspective by sobering images from the disaster zone. For three days this week the whole country shared three minutes of silence each afternoon to mourn the victims, now confirmed at 41,353 but expected to rise above 50,000. The local and international community has rallied to help the relief effort. Residents have donated cash, blankets, food and water at drop-off points throughout the city. The Bookworm, a western restaurant and cultural venue, is serving as a donation centre and a rallying point for volunteers. Some of Ethan’s staff took his project car up to the region on Monday packed with food and water and he is working on longer-term strategies for rebuilding and relief.

Over the weekend, before the aftershock alarm struck, it seemed that a fragile calm had been restored to the city. The streets were filled with their usual summer bustle, most restaurants and shops were open and many people had returned to work. But, as Monday night’s panic revealed, Chengdu is still reeling from shock, and fraught with nervous anticipation about the immediate future. Everyone is trying to return to normalcy and, at the same time, struggling to process what has happened and prepare for further possible calamity.

The earth is still moving more often than I feel comfortable with, but the focus now is on regaining a sense of normalcy and seeing what we can do to help those whose lives are in ruins. Most of all, like everyone else in Chengdu, I am distressed by the stories of devastation and loss so close to home, and grateful that the quake did not strike harder here, in this high-rise city of 12 million people. We all share the feelings of a 22 year-old woman extracted from the rubble after 3 days, who told her rescuers, “I’m still alive. I’m happy.”

Gold Class Master Hairdresser

2008-04-01T16:17:00.000+08:00

I was a little disappointed when the “Century Workmanlike Scissors” hair salon had a makeover and changed its name to “Century Salon.” But I got over it when I discovered Zheng Ping working there. He delivers a first-class haircut for 50 yuan (₤3.33) and he can talk a blue streak about most subjects, particularly about Sichuan. The first time he cut my hair, about a year ago, his daughter had just been born and he had turned down a chance to work in the UK because he didn’t want to leave his young family behind.
This decision has paid off: the girl who washed my hair this week informed me that Zheng Ping is now a “gold class master hairdresser” and his rate has gone up to 90 yuan (₤6). As usual, when I sat down for my haircut he told me that I really need to let him perm my hair. “You don’t believe me”, he said, “you’re afraid of the result, but I know.” “I do believe you”, I said, “you are a gold class master hairdresser.” This made him laugh and he told me, “you really understand Chinese culture.” All these years of studying the language and living here, and no-one has ever told me that I really understand Chinese culture until now, and he is my hairdresser.

I’m not implying that Zheng Ping is a bad judge of Chinese culture, in fact this week he gave me a lecture on local history. I was telling him about our trip to the ancient Sichuan town of Langzhong over Easter weekend. He knew it well and told me that it was a frontier town between Sichuan and the rest of China, the first city that people reached after crossing the mountains from the north. He said that the Sichuan basin was settled repeatedly by migrants from other areas. The original inhabitants, the Ba and Shu peoples, who were responsible for the 3000 year old Jinsha Culture (the extraordinary bug-eyed gold masks and other artifacts unearthed at several sites around Chengdu), were gradually pushed out to the remote parts of the province as others arrived. Zheng Ping said you can still see people in some areas of Sichuan who look like those gold masks, with pointed ears and protruding eyes, and they are the descendents of the Ba and Shu. I think he might have been pulling my leg there, but his main point was that the waves of migrants explain the open-hearted nature of Sichuan people. That’s why we Sichuanese are so sociable and open-minded, he claimed, because we have always welcomed newcomers throughout our history.

Zheng Ping’s great-great grandfather was one of those migrants and he arrived in Sichuan with only his bed-roll and a few tools. But he was successful here and by the end of his life had built a vast wooden house for his family. Zheng Ping’s grandfather grew up in that house but it was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and Zheng Ping never saw it himself. He stopped blow-drying my hair completely at this point to shake his head over the loss of that beautiful house.

During the Cultural Revolution Zheng Ping’s parents were sent to a remote area to work and they stayed to raise their family. He grew up in Aba Prefecture, on the Tibetan Plateau in the western part of the province. In the 90s I took several overland trips through Aba, hiking and hitching on trucks or riding interminably slow buses across the spectacular grasslands. There are only a few small towns, no more than a couple of cross-streets and a bunch of pool tables. Nomads ride into town to shop and play pool, and their horses hitched by the store-fronts lend a wild-west feel. The few Han Chinese are either working for the government or running small restaurants, but none of them seem very happy about it. So it was a pleasant surprise to hear Zheng Ping enthusing about his childhood there. It can’t have been an easy life: his older brother and sister died, and his mother still refers to him and his younger brother as “3rd son” and “4th son”, although he has been the oldest for more than 20 years. But Zheng Ping only talks about how beautiful it is in Aba, and the incredible hiking trips he took with his friends every summer. He said it was a wonderful place to grow up.

I asked whether he stayed there for high school and he said he did, and that he was influenced particularly by one very open-minded teacher, who taught him and his friends to appreciate their surroundings. This teacher had been a student at Beijing University in 1989 and, as a result of his involvement in the events of that year, he was exiled to a remote corner of Sichuan, like Zheng Ping’s parents before him. It sounded as though he had made the best of it, and made a deep impression on his students.

I thought about Zheng Ping and his teacher recently when I met the writer Qiu Xiao-Long, who was in Chengdu as part of the Bookworm Literary Festival. He has written a series of mystery novels set in Shanghai, featuring a poetry-writing detective, Inspector Chen. My friend Ingrid moderated his talk and took him out sight-seeing the next day, and I joined them for breakfast. We went to a small street lined with food vendors in an area scheduled for demolition and ate soft Tofu with chilli sauce. One of the stalls was called “Lao Geming” – Old Revolution, which caught Qiu Xiao-long’s eye. He told us about a restaurant in Beijing that caters to the nostalgia of Educated Youth who were sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. It serves food like millet porridge and bitter greens to guests seated cross-legged around a kang, a raised square oven that is the centre of rural homes in northern China. The restaurant has guest books, different ones for different provinces, where former Educated Youth can search for their old companions and leave messages saying “I was in such and such a village in Hunan Province, call me on this number if you remember me”.

Ingrid said that made it sound as though some people had positive experiences at that time, perhaps some did enjoy learning from the peasants and building the new China. But Qiu Xiao-long said that for the vast majority it was a bitter experience. As young people from the cities they were ill-equipped to cope with manual labour and harsh rural life and they were generally not welcomed by the local people. He said that many young women were raped by village leaders, or were forced to sleep with them to get permission to return home to the city. “Those who do have fond memories are not nostalgic for the experience”, he told us, “they are nostalgic for their youth.”

Red Velvet Tuk-Tuk

2008-03-31T11:28:00.003+08:00

Friday 28 March

After another month of waiting around for taxis over the New Year Holiday, because all the drivers were busy taking their relatives shopping, I recently decided we needed our own transport. Working for an NGO our budget doesn’t run to chauffeur-driven minivans, like many of our friends in the private sector, so we bought a second-hand tuk-tuk for £35. You would probably know it as a “tuk-tuk”, like the motorbike taxis in Thailand, but here it’s called a “san lun che” or “three-wheeled car”, and we call it a “pouss-pouss” because we bought it from French friends and that’s what they called it.

It is not actually a motorbike, I am not that brave, but an electric bicycle with a two-seater bench welded onto the back, upholstered in red velvet for a touch of glamour. It’s a popular form of transport here, especially among the elderly. You often see an old man peddling one, with his wife and several bags of vegetables piled on the bench behind, or a red-faced woman cycling her chubby grandson to school. Several of my French friends use them for transporting their kids around, the Europeans being more adventurous about many aspects of life here than the Americans and Brits. (E.g about giving birth here, but that’s another story). My friend Bénédicte is very enthusiastic about hers, and the sight of her zipping around town inspired me to snap this one up when its previous owner left town.

Although a bargain at 500 yuan, it needed some work before it was roadworthy: not one of the 3 locks worked (engine, battery, storage compartment), the brakes were loose, the seat wobbled and the lights were all dead. These problems were easy to fix but the indicators are more challenging - they only beep when turned on, there is no light or any actual indicator. So you know you are going to turn and perhaps someone cycling next to you might hear the beep, but no-one behind you will.

I took a while to build up confidence driving it, although the controls are a piece of cake, (also there are always the pedals to fall back on if the battery runs low, which is very likely as it only has about 60 minutes of power). It was the other traffic that intimidated me, and more to the point the other rules of the road. While the highway code is fairly similar to ours, the driving protocol is different. Instead of keeping an eye on all the traffic and traffic controls and driving accordingly, drivers here fix their eyes on their goal and head towards it, taking evasive action as necessary. This works well as a system, as long as everyone does the same thing. Like a flock of birds, the crowd of vehicles avoids collisions by paying attention only to their immediate neighbours. I had figured this out by observing and by riding my bicycle around town, but I thought problems might arise if I tried to drive the way I do in the west. So I didn’t even try. My only concession to western protocol is that the boys and I wear helmets, otherwise I just go with the flow. No indicating - the beeping is just a distraction - no slowing down at the lights - someone would probably rear-end me – I just keep pace with everyone else and avoid anything that’s in the way.

So far it seems to be working. My only real difficulty, whether on the pouss-pouss or my bike, is when other vehicles are coming the wrong way down a one-way traffic lane. This happens because many roads have slow traffic lanes for bikes and motorbikes, but people don’t want to go all around the block to cross over into the correct lane, so they cut down the opposite side of the road. But there’s no rule for which side they should pass the traffic going the right way, because they shouldn’t be there in the first place. So if it is just one or two bikes, they tend to hug the curb, and you pass them on their left, but if there are a lot of them and the one-way lane has temporarily become a two-way road, then everyone passes on the right. It’s just that sometimes people don’t decide which is which until the last-minute, and that can be nerve-wracking.

I pay 11 yuan (80p) a month to park in our housing compound’s underground garage, where old Mrs Lin sits watch over a room full of bikes and motorbikes. The room is damp and her tiny living area is separated only by a flowered curtain hung up on a piece of wire, but she has a huge flat-screen tv and the compound cleaners come and sit with her when they have time off. She helps me maneuvre the unwieldy frame out of the gates, but I have to push it up the steep ramp by myself. It’s not an easy exit, but on the whole the pouss-pouss is a success, at least for trips around the neighbourhood. It has given us a measure of freedom.

Sunday 30 March

Yesterday we took a trip to Donghu Park, an ideal pouss-pouss destination. It’s just down the road so no danger of running out of juice, but too far to walk and a notorious dead-zone for cabs. Ethan came with us on his bike, so he got a little exercise and everyone was happy. The boys had fun rolling down the hills and some friendly kids let Isaac fly their kites. From the hill-top we saw a hot air balloon on the other side of the lake, so on the way out we stopped to see what was going on.

It was a wedding, with the guests seated on peach-coloured chairs beside the lake, and everyone who happened to be in the park that day crowded around for a good look. All necks were craned to stare at the balloon hovering above. As it slowly began to lower to the ground we saw a figure in white dress and veil shouting instructions into a two-way radio. The bride was making her entrance. She landed smoothly and clambered out of the basket, sporting a rather lovely pair of white feathered wings on her back. The maid of honour removed the wings and she joined the groom under an archway of flowers. An M.C. cleared his throat into a very loud microphone and instructed everyone to welcome the bride and groom on their happiest day. As we left the park we could hear the M.C. shouting the wedding vows in a hectoring tone more usual at political rallies: “DO YOU AGREE – TO TAKE THIS MAN – FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE – TO CHERISH AND CARE FOR…..etc.

It was the most western-style wedding I had ever seen, with the white dress and flowered archways and confetti. It was the first time I have seen guests seated on rows of chairs, instead of around banquet tables with chopsticks poised to begin eating the minute the preliminaries were over. But the couple had certainly made it their own, despite the large crowd of onlookers. I’ve never seen an entrance like it, and I loved the wings. It turned out that the bride worked for Air China, so perhaps she used her connections to secure the air-space.

Christmas in Chengdu

2007-12-22T16:37:00.000+08:00

Because we went back to the UK in November for my Dad’s 70th birthday celebration, we decided to stay here over Christmas, and possibly travel somewhere in China. It’s a good time of year to travel because it's not a holiday here, so you don't get the enormous crowds of determined pleasure-seekers that you see during the May, October and New Year holidays. As it turns out, however, our passports are all going to be at the police station for renewal of our residence visas, so we won’t even be doing that. But we have never had Christmas here before as a family (we draw a veil over the first year here, when Isaac and I went back to the UK, but Ethan stayed because of work obligations and ended up spending two weeks in hospital due to a severe allergic reaction), so we have decided to make the best of it and create our own holiday atmosphere.

This isn’t so difficult in fact, because the Chinese are embracing Christmas as never before. I was aware of a definite increase in tinsel, fake snow and sparkly Santa faces strung up around the place every year. This stuff is all made in China, after all, so why shouldn’t some of it be sold here? And more and more people join in the local tradition for young people to gather in the main square downtown on Christmas Eve and have fun. Well what they actually do is smash each other over the head with long balloons, but why they do it is a mystery. It’s one of those things like a Mexican wave, that someone starts and everyone else just runs with. Xiao Long says you can’t walk 3 feet downtown without being assaulted by a complete stranger, usually painlessly but not always. She said that someone died in Tianfu Square on Christmas Eve last year, although she wasn’t sure what of. I suspect that a traffic accident is more likely to have been the cause than a balloon assault.

This trend is not going away, though, it has a life of it’s own. A young woman asked Ethan this week how he would be celebrating Christmas and he explained that it’s a day to be with the family, eat a large meal, open presents and play with the children. Then he asked how she would be celebrating. “Oh we celebrate the same way that you do in the west”, she said confidently, “by hitting each other with balloons.”

The misunderstandings about Christmas run deep. Xiao Long asked me last week if Christmas is our western version of the Chinese New Year. I said that it’s true it is our major holiday and it is followed by our new year celebration, but Christmas itself is a religious holiday. This was totally news to her. I felt that further explanations were called for, so I dug out a lift-the-flap nativity book that Sam’s Godmother sent him for his birthday, and went through it explaining the Christmas story in Chinese. I felt a bit like a missionary, which was a new experience, but I decided it was more cultural enlightenment than conversion. Xiao Long had heard of Christianity before I think, but not Jesus and she certainly hadn’t a clue that Christmas was his birthday. Certain elements of the story made sense to her however; she kept saying things like, “oh, so that’s why you put a star on top of the Christmas tree”, and “is that why you give gifts at Christmas?”

Later in the week her daughter Zeng Jing had to write up some notes about Christmas on her classroom notice-board, so I printed out a bunch of pages from a Chinese internet site, which explained every tradition in detail for a Chinese audience. (I’ll translate a few choice sentences later if I have the chance.) So now her family are pretty much the local experts on all things to do with Christmas. This has its downside for Xiao Long: Zeng Jing now wants them to actually celebrate Christmas and has been asking if she could have a Christmas stocking so Santa would bring her presents as well. After all, he is supposed to visit every girl and boy. I was given some red and white stockings in a store promotion so I said that I would prepare stockings for Zeng Jing and her two cousins.

In addition to feeling like a missionary I now also feel slightly guilty of increasing the spread of commercial Christmas. Seeing all of my preparations, Xiao Long and Xiao Zeng both went out and bought presents for the boys and gift-wrapped them to put under the tree. They only just brought presents for their birthdays and no doubt they will buy them again at Chinese New Year, and they are far too generous. Xiao Long spent 80 yuan on Isaac’s birthday present, which is about one-fifteenth of her monthly salary. If we spent the same percentage of our income on Zeng Jing she really would think that Santa had come to visit.

Xiao Long's family aren't the only ones paying more attention to Christmas; I can't speak for other parts of China but here in Chengdu, everyone seems to be catching on. A Tibetan friend invited us out for a Christmas meal this year instead of waiting until the Tibetan New Year as he usually does, and Ethan's colleagues dropped by on Christmas Eve with a bottle of wine and an enormous bouquet of flowers (after first making sure that we wouldn't be spending the evening carousing with balloons at Tianfu Square). It's the custom to send out text messages wishing your friends good fortune at Chinese holidays, but this year people sent them out for Christmas as well. They say things like, "may this Christmas tree bring you vitality, happiness, wealth, fortune and good luck", or "may your wallet be as full as Santa's bag of presents!"

Santa, provider of stuff, is definitely the leading light of commercial Christmas. At Isaac’s school holiday program there were 3 separate plays set in Lapland, featuring naughty elves and Father and Mrs. Christmas. It's an international school with children from many cultures so that’s fair enough, I’m not expecting them to put on a nativity play like the local Church of England primary. (If we wanted that we could pop down the road to the Chengdu International School, which has a very religious focus and asks parents to sign a statement pledging their child’s education to God.) All the same I did breathe a sigh of relief, after the parade of elves, when Isaac and the other children sang Silent Night. Up to that point if Xiao Long had been present she could have listened to the whole program and still been none the wiser about the reason for Christmas.

The Neighbours

2007-12-13T13:17:00.001+08:00

The first I knew of our new neighbours was when I rode up in the lift with Xiao Wang the water-delivery man and noticed that he was delivering cigarettes and soft drinks instead of water. Because the tap water here is not safe to drink everyone has a water cooler in their home, and when the barrel is empty, we call downstairs to the shop and order a new one. Xiao Wang spends his days shouldering water barrels, staggering across the compound and installing them in peoples’ flats. In our case this is especially difficult, as we put our water cooler 3 feet off the ground on top of an old filing cabinet to prevent Sam from flooding the place. Despite this he is always very cheerful and greets Sam and Isaac whenever he sees them outside. Sam calls him “water delivery uncle” (song shui shu-shu), which makes perfect sense in Chinese.

I had never seen Xiao Wang delivering anything else before, apart from some packets of instant noodles once for Xiao Long’s lunch. It seemed cheeky to have the guy run around with your cigarettes when the shop is only just downstairs, so I was extremely curious when he got out at our floor and rang the bell of the next-door flat. This flat had been empty since the family bought a penthouse on the top floor and moved upstairs, but I knew they were trying to find tenants and I was intrigued to find out who our new neighbours were. The door was answered by a young man with a shaggy hair cut and baggy trousers. The tv in the room behind him was turned up full volume and even after I had gone into our flat and closed the door, I could hear it as if it was in our sitting room. This was not a good sign. Even less good when it continued all day and late into the night, supplemented by the doorbell ringing on and off as other young men with shaggy haircuts came and went.

The next day I asked Xiao Long if she had noticed the new neighbours. “Ayo, they are a bunch of layabouts!” she exclaimed indignantly. “They sit around all day watching tv and smoking. What are they up to?” She had found out that there were 4 young men sharing the apartment, but only 1 or 2 of them appeared to have a key because several times a day one of them would hammer on the door or ring the bell repeatedly to be let in. The guys inside probably couldn’t hear because of the tv. Over the next few days Xiao Long kept me posted on what was going on. She was outraged by the appearance of several young women who went in and out at odd hours, but she was most annoyed by the tv noise, as were we. Ironically my friend Louise, who is thinking of buying a flat in this compound, had asked me just the week before whether we were bothered by noise from our neighbours. I had airily replied that we never heard anything, apart from the person upstairs who has a heavy tread going to bed late at night, and someone’s child who practices the piano, luckily fairly well, on weekend mornings. But I spoke too soon.

Xiao Long wondered if these young guys are operating a “tea house” in the flat. “You mean people come there to drink tea?” I asked incredulously. “Not just to drink tea,” she said, meaningfully, “opening a private tea house in your home is all the rage at the moment. You have 3 or 4 tables and people come to play mahjong or poker, mostly poker because the stakes are higher.” Comprehension dawned. “You mean people are gambling? Isn’t that illegal?” “Of course it is, but when has that stopped anybody?” Xiao Long told me that her husband’s older brother had invested in a one ninth share in a private tea house earlier this year and in the first month he made 30,000 yuan (about 20,000 pounds) from his share alone! The owners make their money by taking a cut of the winners’ earnings, which gives you an idea of how much money is changing hands. They provide tea and snacks and sometimes food as well and of course shoulder the risk of operating an illegal business, which probably involves pay-offs to the police. Even legal businesses have to deal with pay-offs. A friend of ours who runs a restaurant here in Chengdu was asked to pay some money to a government office and when he refused, he was told his business was creating a noise hazard and he would have to close unless he could get a written statement of approval from every resident on the street, which was lined with blocks of flats.

It seemed unlikely to me that the shaggy boys next door were running a gambling den in a respectable flat in Jinguan New City, but you never know. After a couple of days Xiao Long bumped into the new neighbour’s landlady in the lift and she asked her if we were bothered by the noise. Xiao Long let her have it, but this came as no surprise to the landlady. Apparently she had received complaints from all over the building. Even the people 2 floors above were bothered by the noise and she had already told the young men that they would either have to tone it down or leave the flat. A week later you wouldn’t even know they were there, except when one of them forgets his key. Perhaps they all found respectable jobs, or perhaps they are still in there all day, watching tv with the volume lowered. There has been no sign of any young women, let alone any potential gamblers. If they are running a “tea house”, business is very slow.

At the Mall

2007-12-13T13:16:00.000+08:00

At the Mall.

25 November 2007

Ethan is away at the moment and I took the boys to the nearby mall at the weekend, to pick up a few things at the supermarket and spend a couple of hours at the soft play center there. The mall is only just down the road, about 10 minutes walk from our house and is a popular destination for shopping and leisure. In the evenings the square in front is filled with elderly couples ballroom dancing.

In the lift we were standing behind a young woman, probably about 20 years old. I noticed her because she was wearing a tightly-belted white woolen coat over a short white skirt, white knee high patent leather boots and a white knit cap. This is a fairly typical outfit for an afternoon’s shopping trip, dressing up is all the rage here. That same morning I saw a middle-aged woman leaving our compound wearing a full-length black mink coat and 4 inch silver stilletos. She was probably just going out for lunch, or an afternoon of Mah-jong. I suppose it's the same principle of conspicious consumption as the Mercedes and the BMWs in the car park: if you've made it, you want to make sure everyone knows.

I also noticed that the girl in white in the elevator at the mall was holding hands with a girlfriend, who was similarly dressed up. She was standing with her eyes closed, leaning her head on her friend’s shoulder. Watching them I realized this is a sight you would rarely see in a western country, but it is commonplace here. Unfortunately it does not mean that same-sex relationships are accepted in China. What it means is that physical displays of affection between men and women are still frowned on, but it is fine and dandy to be physically affectionate with friends of the same sex. So it is perfectly normal to see young girls holding hands or young men in army uniforms strolling around arm in arm, but it is less usual to see a couple canoodling in public. This is changing slowly: the ballroom dancing couples are more likely to be man and women nowadays, although the majority of them are still male couples and female couples, solemnly waltzing round the plaza.

You do see couples engaged in other forms of affection, however. On this same day at the mall I noticed a young couple sitting on a bench, the girl busily cleaning out her boyfriend’s ears with a Q-tip! It sounds revolting, but nobody turned a hair. Don’t forget it is traditional to grow your little finger nail long for this very purpose. But if you haven’t done so, there are plenty of alternatives: at the parks and tea houses people come around with ear cleaning kits and offer to clean out your ears for you.

The physical affection thing changes somewhat with age, more with men than with women. You don’t tend to see middle-aged men holding hands, unless they are very drunk. But I do have one glorious image that is lodged in my mind like a Cartier-Bresson photograph. Outside this same mall one day, I saw two middle-aged men in dusty, paint-spattered clothes, probably migrant construction workers, running at full tilt down the road, hand in hand. Perhaps they were late for something or running to catch a lift, who knows, but they were laughing as they ran and their faces were a picture of pure joy. I wish I had had a camera at that moment.

Good Language

2007-12-13T13:15:00.001+08:00

15 October 2007

After a week away with the family, speaking only English, Sam’s language abilities have taken a sudden leap forward. Overnight it seemed, he was able to speak in sentences and he keeps surprising me with a remark or a phrase I had no idea he could say, such as “Sam Isaac sharing cookies”or “Sam putting milk on cereal”.

He has always been good at applying the words he knows to describe things he doesn’t know, such as “apple-juice” for all drinks and “cookie” for not only food items but any small, round things, e.g. “mama ear cookie” for earring. But recently he has extended this to concepts he doesn’t have words for. I first noticed in Bangkok airport, when we walked past a 20 foot statue of a demon with a blue body and a fierce expression. Sam ran to catch up with me saying “Sam hurting”, and I thought he probably meant he was scared but wasn’t sure. But later on we passed a whole tableau of similar blue demons and he was quite clear than that they were “hurting shu-shu” (uncles). Last night he was sitting at the table and suddenly started crying, although not very convincingly. When I asked him what was wrong, he pointed at a green plastic dragon of Isaacs that was sitting on the table. “Hurting toy!” he exclaimed, burying his face in my shirt. Not being biased at all I think it is brilliant of him to apply the concept of physical hurt to mental hurt. Soon enough he will learn the word “scared” and stop using “hurting” but I’ll miss it when he does, just as I already miss him saying “oo-ay” for where and “bummy” instead of “bunny”.

Sam has also, just in the past month, drawn a clear distinction between Chinese and English. Before, he would mix up words from the two languages in the same sentence. He would say “hello shu-shu” for example, or he would speak to me in Chinese and to Xiao Long in English. He doesn’t do this anymore. Now he will say something to me in English, then turn to Xiao Long and say the same sentence to her, but in Chinese. And if he doesn’t know a word in Chinese, or English, he doesn’t usually use the word from the other language. He knows how to say tea in English but when Xiao Long asked him what Mummy was drinking he thought about it and said “Sam bu zhidao” (Sam doesn’t know). To double-check I asked him in English what I was drinking and he said “Mama drinking hot tea.” He knows who he should speak to in which language and he rarely makes mistakes.

(3) Out and About

2007-09-26T14:55:00.000+08:00

We have started taking family trips to sites around Chengdu on Sunday afternoons. By the time Sam has woken up from his nap and we’ve all rallied ourselves it’s a short excursion, but an hour or two of public space is long enough for the boys anyway, and then we find somewhere interesting for dinner. We have tended not to do much of this until recently, partly because whenever we considered going somewhere at the weekend, we would think of the crowds and the attention the boys would get, and usually decide it was preferable to stay and play in our compound. But now that Sam is old enough to run around by himself we have decided to explore a little more.

Last week we went to Tianfu Square in the center of Chengdu. This is a large plaza overlooked by a 20 foot tall statue of Chairman Mao, his arm raised in a revolutionary salute. The square itself is new although the statue has been there for a long time. Ethan said that there didn’t used to be a central square in Chengdu, so during the June 4 protests local students had to gather at a nearby department store, which they burned down. Yes, here in Chengdu even political protest takes place in a shopping mall. This does beg the question of why the authorities would want to provide an alternative location such as a large central square. One can only assume that the square is extremely well monitored and protected from such possibilities. Apparently China is the second most observed society in the world...... second only to the UK.

Nonetheless we had a fun hour or so running round in circles and taking photos in front of the Mao statue. If the space is big enough the boys can run away from unwelcome attention. Sam was oblivious to it all until recently, but he has started to resent it. The sight of a group of strangers in formation, shrieking endearments and bearing down on you at high speed must be a little scary, especially if you are under 3 feet tall. So he has started taking tips from his brother, who tends to lash out at anyone who dares to approach him. The pair of them karate kicking together doesn’t exactly decrease the levels of attention.

The news from Xiao Long’s extended family is that her friend Xiao Wu’s ex-husband has been staying in her apartment for the past month. Xiao Wu is the friend who was driven to jump off a bridge by her husband’s behaviour, but after recovering from that sh eventually ran off to their hometown, taking all his money with her. He must have got some of it back because Xiao Long was telling me that he just lost everything again in some kind of phony pyramid investment scheme and is totally down on his luck. He was persuaded to invest by his older sister, who lost even more than he did. After Xiao Wu left him and they got divorced, but he followed her back home and they continued to see each other. Xiao Wu opened a tea house and mahjong parlour and he tried to help out, but the business didn’t do well. As Xiao Long said, you can’t make money from something like that if you are too fond of playing mahjong yourself. So Xiao Wu is thinking of returning to Chengdu, but Xiao Long said she won’t help her find a job this time, not after she walked out on her last family so suddenly. Not to mention letting her beloved Sam fall over and whack his head on a stone step.

I am amazed at the lengths Xiao Long and her family and friends will go to help each other out. They don’t have medical insurance or any kind of social welfare safety net, so they rely on each other. If someone is sick or has a financial setback, everyone else chips in and clears out their bank account if necessary to pay the bills. It’s a different kind of social welfare. People here can be indifferent to the plight of a stranger, cycling right by someone who has been hurt in a traffic accident, or pausing only for lengthy rubbernecking before hurrying on their way, but they will give everything they have to someone in their circle.

In the case of Xiao Wu’s husband, Xiao Long said she and her husband don’t have enough money right now to lend him any, so all they could do was offer him a place to sleep and eat for a while. So he is living with them and working as a pedicab driver. This is gruelling work, he is out of the door at 8 am and sometimes doesn’t get home until 2 or 3 in the morning, but he can make a lot of money from it, nearly three thousand yuan since he started a month ago. He and his first wife are jointly responsible for their daughter’s college tuition and living expenses. He is supposed to send her several hundred a month plus half of the annual tuition, but recently the mother has paid all the tuition herself from her wages in a factory in Guangdong. When he goes back to their hometown he lives with his younger sister, who is doing OK according to Xiao Long, a regular family who own their own apartment and earn about two thousand yuan a month. His other daughter, the one he had with Xiao Wu, lives with her grandmother. I’ve never met the guy but it strikes me that there are a lot of capable women keeping him afloat.

(2) Dinner Time!

2007-09-17T14:33:00.001+08:00

Blog 2 Dinner Time

I was thinking this week about which aspects of being a stay-at-home mother are easier here than they would be at home and which are more difficult. There is no doubt that having Xiao Long and Xiao Zeng to help me is an enormous blessing. Partly what it does is compensate for the fact that the basic domestic routine is more time-consuming here: clothes get dirtier and have to be washed more often, there’s no dryer so they have to be hung out and the washing machine is an old fashioned top-loader, so the clothes come out all scrunched up and everything needs ironing. And the furniture has to be dusted and the floor mopped every day or so, otherwise layers of grimy dust accumulate overnight. I don’t remember that at home, I don’t think I dusted more than once a year when I lived in London, and it wasn’t a problem, although quite possibly my standards were lower. Without help there would be no end to it here, but two ayis more than make up for the difference and leave me free to do other things, so that is definitely an aspect that is easier. Nonetheless, there are certain things they cannot help with.

For me the most stressful time of the day is dinner preparation and consumption. Thinking about it, this is true to a certain extent when I am back in the UK, but not quite in the same way. Of course it would be a walk in the park if I just delegated all the shopping and cooking to Xiao Long, which is what many people and all working mothers do, but as we find her food virtually inedible that isn’t really an option. I do resort to it sometimes, when I have to be out of the door at 6 pm for a meeting, but I will then come home to find that Isaac refused to eat the meal and Xiao Long made him a jam sandwich instead. Plus, much as we love good Chinese food, our tastes are still essentially western and western food is what we all want to eat most nights of the week.

So shopping and cooking takes up a fair amount of each day, and this involves levels of stress not present at home. For example, getting to the shops in the first place entails waiting on the street for taxis, on the way back laden down with many small, heavy and easily-broken plastic shopping bags. Sometimes this is a smooth operation, with a friendly, helpful driver pulling up smartly to the curb in front of me. But other times it involves a lot of frustrating hanging around, hailing cabs which whoosh past with a supercilious glare from the driver, despite there being no evidence of a passenger unless he or she is prone in the back seat.

I have to digress here and say that if a cab does stop, it is frequently nabbed from under my nose by someone else, an elderly lady who was lurking in the shadow under a tree or more often a young woman in high heels who totters out from nowhere and grabs the door handle right in front of me. Men don’t do this to me as often as women, although they do to Ethan apparently. It is a particularly infuriating cultural quirk, one that makes the Little Englander blood in me boil with fury at the sheer rudeness of it. But like so many other things it just comes down to different rules. Getting a cab here is not a case of first come, first served, but first past the post. It’s the same basic rule as for driving: just look out for yourself, move towards your goal, avoid obstacles and ignore what everyone else is doing. If everyone does this, the system is surprisingly coherent; the problems arise when someone breaks the rules and pays attention to other traffic. The cab-stealing routine is based on the same principle: people spot a cab and try to get in it, oblivious of who else might be doing the same thing. I am one of those rule-breaking problems, giving everyone in the vicinity the evil eye to try and guilt-trip them into acknowledging I have been waiting longest. But it is very tempting to slide into this habit and I have to confess to sometimes turning a blind eye to the person who might possibly have been waiting before me. Is this acculturation? Or just plain bad manners?

The time I was most infuriated by it was when I was bringing the children home after watching the local ex-pat rugby team one Saturday afternoon. We strolled towards the main road with a couple of other long-term residents of Chengdu, making small talk as we went. We reached the road and the man next to us stuck out his hand to flag down the first cab. Oh, how helpful of him, I thought as I stood there clutching one child with each hand. But instead of helping me load the children into the cab, or even just waving me towards it and looking for another one, the man just jumped into it and sailed away without a backward glance. That is plain bad manners, in any culture.

Anyway once I get to the store, which is usually Carrefour, there are other challenges ahead. Yes, it is a large French supermarket chain and it does stock a certain amount of imported western food and some western things made for the local market. It also stocks many things completely unavailable at home, and on an adventurous day I may try my luck with some of them. Certainly I love the range of fruit and vegetables and the amazing number of different pulses and varieties of rice, not to mention the subtle varieties of green tea. The fresh market has higher quality produce but I usually end up in Carrefour because it also sells things like cheese and pasta and washing up liquid, which the market does not. Plus the meat is packaged and doesn’t still have hooves attached, which I cannot quite get used to.

With the food finally prepared, I usually sit down with Isaac and Sam at around 6 o’clock to feed them. At some point before this Isaac will ask in a wary voice, “what am I having for dinner?” If I say “spaghetti and bacon” or “pizza”, his response is ecstatic. If I say anything else, there will be whining and complaining. But our system doesn’t brook any complaints, so we sit down anyway and I set a kitchen timer to give him 30 minutes to eat. At some point, as he resentfully pushes his chicken and rice and broccoli around the plate he often asks me, “why can’t you make things I like for dinner?”

So then we have this conversation:
“OK, tell me what you like.”
“I like pizza with bacon!”
“Good, that’s one thing.”
“And spaghetti with bacon! And hot dogs!”
“OK, What else?
“Uh, cheese on toast…..and croque monsieur!”
“So that’s toasted cheese with or without ham in it”
“Yes, that counts as two things.”
“Fine. Anything else?”
“Hmmm…….quesadillas!”

You see where this is going: he’ll eat anything so long as it is a wheat-based carbohydrate topped with melted cheese, with or without some form of over-salted pork product.

I try to point this out to him gently. “Sweetheart, those things you like are all the same kinds of food. I do make you those things several times a week but you need to eat different things as well, from the food pyramid you leaned about at school, remember?”

“Yes, but the biggest part of the pyramid is bread and toast and spaghetti, it’s good to eat loads of those foods." “True, but you cab't only eat the bottom part and the top part, you also need to eat lots of vegetables and fruit and protein like meat and fish. Can you think of something you like that doesn’t have bread or cheese or bacon in it?”

A pause, then a triumphant exclamation: “I know….candy floss!”

In the meantime, Sam will have shoveled half of the food in his bowl into his mouth and spread the rest around his person and the surrounding surfaces. He will then shout, “bu zuo, bu zuo!”, (no sit) struggle out of his seat and attempt to clamber onto the table to gain better access to glasses of water, hot cups of tea, pepper grinders and other attractive objects. Isaac then wants to get up and play with him and we go through the ritual of pretending to glue his butt to his chair until he has finished eating. At some point this results in a cry of,
“No fair! How come Sam gets to play and I don’t?”
“Sam has eaten his dinner already.”
“Not all of it, a lot is on his t-shirt.”
“True, but he ate enough, he ate it while you were still talking. Back in your chair.”

Another level of stress is that while buying the food, and while preparing it come to that, and for several hours afterwards, in fact basically until we all wake up safely the next morning, I worry about food safety. This is a big issue in China at the moment, as I’m sure you have seen in the papers. There was a very good BBC Radio Four news piece on the subject this summer, by Fuschia Dunlop on From Our Own Correspondent. I cannot access it from where I am right now but you can probably find it if you search the bbc site.

The current scare in our area is a pig disease called “blue ear”, which has caused the price of pork to sky-rocket. I assume that a large, foreign-owned supermarket chain is not going to buy pork from blue-eared pigs, but I still wonder every time I cook pork, or any other meat for that matter, let alone seafood. Even with fruit and veg. there is the issue of pesticides. OK, pesticides are everywhere, but what if I just happen to buy a bunch of spinach grown by a farmer who, knowingly or otherwise, bought a cheap load of pesticide made from something really deadly? There was a recent scandal in Beijing about meat dumplings filled with cardboard softened with caustic soda, another about milk that didn’t contain any actual milk…and then there was the tub of chocolate ice-cream I bought last week, thinking at the time that it felt a little on the light side, only to open it up at dinner-time and find it was already half eaten! Think about it all too long and I’m ready to serve cheese on toast every night.

Finally, however, the meal is finished and the mood lightens. Sam, like me, gets very grumpy when he’s hungry, but immediately after eating he gains a new burst of energy and good humour. Isaac is relieved that the dinner ordeal is over for another day. After he has reluctantly jammed the last piece of broccoli into his mouth, usually just as his timer rings, and I’ve picked the clumps of rice from Sam’s clothes, and we have tussled with the dustpan and brush for a while, me trying to sweep up the discarded food and Sam trying to spread it around again, then it’s playtime. So that by the time Ethan walks through the door, everyone is happy, there is music playing and the boys are dancing around or playing hide and seek or jumping on the sofas. Then it’s time for dessert, as long as it’s not ice-cream.

(1) Catching Up

2007-09-10T08:47:00.000+08:00

Catching Up

It has been several months since I posted anything, the long three-month school holiday being the main reason. We travelled to the US, the UK and, once back in Chengdu, up to the Tibetan grasslands for a memorable week.

But now we are back into the school routine, I have resolved to write one substantial post every week for the next year. Allowing myself a couple of weeks off, that will be 50 posts between now and September 2008. Assuming we stay in China, which looks increasingly likely, I should end up with a record of the highs and lows of life in Chengdu with a young family. It will be interesting to look back on and for the boys to read when they are older, if nothing else.

We have been back from our travels for 6 weeks now, but I am only just beginning to feel settled again. Having spent all summer telling friends and family how much we enjoy life in China and are looking forward to spending another three years here, I arrived back to the humid, smog-laden city and immediately felt extremely oppressed by the prospect.
I had forgotten how relentlessly urban and polluted the city is, but the drive in from the airport was a grim reminder. As the taxi rattles along the expressway, the view stretching out on either side is of uniformly drab low-rise buildings interspersed with billboards and garish restaurant facades. Inevitably it was an overcast day, which shades everything with the same grey wash of smog.

While you are away you forget minor, unpleasant details, such as the coating of sticky grime that covers everything, or the slightly metallic taste of the air on a heavily polluted day. It does come as a shock when you first arrive back. My British friend Louise returned a few weeks after I did this summer. I spoke to her the next day and asked how she was doing. Not too well she replied, she was so overwhelmed by the filthy air and hadn’t dared to step outside the house yet. I was a little taken aback and said what nice weather it had been over the weekend and in fact really not too bad since I returned from the UK. She then reminded me of the email I had sent her my first day back, describing the drive in from the airport and my general feeling of malaise.

So, within a few weeks I had acclimatised to the air quality and forgotten my initial reaction. This is probably a necessary survival tactic and may also explain the (if you think about it) unforgivable level of general public inertia about the environment. We all just learn to live with it. Certainly people in China do, where the concept of rights, such as the right to breathe clean air or live in a pleasant environment, is very tenuous to begin with. People who grow up in a landscape littered with trash or awash with toxic fumes just assume that’s how life is and rarely think to protest it until something dramatic happens. I have been thinking a lot about this recently, especially after attending a talk about economic growth and the environment in China and reading a New York Times article on the subject. Here is it is you want the grim facts: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/world/asia/26china.html

But whatever the air quality, here we are and gradually getting back into the swing of things. Isaac has begun a new year at school, which was a little hard for him at first because his two best friends moved away over the summer and all his other friends moved up to the next class. Because it is a small school, there are two year groups in each class, which has many advantages, but works against you when you are the only one left behind. Also, by some quirk, there are about 25 five year old kids in the school and only 4 six year olds, and the other 3 are all girls and either new or not particular friendly with Isaac. But we are working on the basis that it will be good for his social skills and sense of responsibility to be the oldest kid in the class, and we’ll see what happens as the year progresses.

The major event of the past week was the announcement from Xiao Zeng, our second ayi, that she is pregnant. Xiao Zeng is Xiao Long's sister-in-law, her husband's older sister. She came to work for us in May after Xiao Wu, her predecessor went back to her home in the countryside. She comes to clean our apartment in the mornings, then walks across the compound to our friends the Pills and cleans their apartment in the afternoons. Xiao Zeng is a tiny woman, small and slight, weighing only 37 kilos (this announcement imparted with disapproval by Xiao Long, who is rotund by Chinese standards). She told me that she has always been very thin, unlike the rest of her family. It did make me wonder....she is the middle child of 5, with an older sister and brother, a younger brother (Xiao Long's husband) and then another sister. The others are all the picture of health but Xiao Zeng has never been strong and as the middle child and a girl to boot, so perhaps she wasn’t as fast with her chopsticks as the others when they were growing up. She hasn't done so well later in life either, although she is a sweet and competent person. But, according to Xiao Long, she is the only one of the five siblings who hasn't really succeeded in the big city and does not own her own home. Xiao Long partly blames this on her poor health and partly on her husband, whom she considers pretty ineffectual. I am not sure what he does but he doesn't earn much money and the family live in a one-room rental with a communal kitchen and bathroom shared with many others. For this they pay 100 yuan per month, or about $13.

Anyway, on Monday morning last week we were changing the sheets on our bed, when she announced that she had something to tell me. I assumed that she might have found a better job or perhaps wanted to move away to work in another part of China. Instead she told me that she was pregnant.

“At first I thought I had a stomach flu”, she said, clutching the edge of the sheet, “I kept taking medicine but I didn’t get better, in fact I started throwing up a lot more. Then yesterday I went to have lunch with some friends and after I threw up a few times they said to me maybe I was pregnant, so I went and bought a test and found out that I am.”

“That’s great!” I said, “Congratulations.” But she didn’t look very happy, so I asked her if she was pleased. She looked uncomfortable. “Not really,” she said. “If I wanted another baby I would have had one much earlier, after I had my son. I did get pregnant again soon after, but I had a really difficult pregnancy with him and I wasn’t healthy for a long time afterwards, so I didn’t have the second baby and I never tried to get pregnant again. Our situation doesn’t really allow it, I would have to stop work for a long time and I’m 37 already, it’s too old, and our son is already ten.” She paused, then added, “Also, you know we have a one-child policy here in China, so it’s difficult”. “Would you have to pay a fine?” I asked. “Not just that. Because I used to belong to a work unit, if I have this baby I will lose my pension and other benefits from there.” I was not aware of this kind of penalty before. I knew that civil servants and others in government employment risked losing their jobs if they had more than one child, but I didn’t know that even if you had left your work unit ten years earlier, you still faced sanctions from them.

“What does your husband think?” I asked her. “He would like to have another child, but he knows it isn’t possible,” she said. “And my son would like a little sister, but he said he doesn’t want me to get sick. My mother and all my sisters said it would be too much for my health. My mother won’t let me have the baby.” That seemed to be the final word on the matter, and Xiao Zeng seemed resigned to the situation. I could just imagine the family conference, with all the sisters and sister-in-law putting in their opinions and the small but forceful matriarch laying down the law.

All the same, Xiao Zeng stood by the bed talking it over for some time, as though she couldn’t quite accept it. She went over the facts several times, not for my benefit as she could see I understood, more as though she was convincing herself. Everything lined up against it, but that didn’t stop her wanting the baby. She knew she didn’t really have a choice, but it was still hard to come to terms with it. She kept saying, “If I wanted another baby I would have had one earlier”, reminding herself that nothing was different now from the last time she was pregnant, except that she was older. I thought, the earlier pregnancy is still a painful memory and now she has to go through the same thing again. Abortions are completely normal here and accepted as part of life, but listening to Xiao Zeng I realized that that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to bear psychologically.

Bad Language

2007-02-26T21:55:00.000+08:00

I imagine that native speakers of Chinese enjoy a few laughs over the meaningless Chinese characters that are used to decorate t-shirts and cushion covers in the rest of the world. They are probably especially amused when people actually tatoo random words onto themselves: "wind" or "east" or "endurance". Similarly I love the mangled English language posted on signs and shopfronts everywhere in China. I mean really, there are so many native speakers here, many of them actually teaching English, that it should be possible to find someone to copy edit, especially when you are about to print thousands of brochures or make signs that millions of foreign tourists will read. But apparently not. So visitors to Du Fu's thatched cottage in Chengdu are given a "warm prompt" not to touch anything, and are offered a choice of trash cans labelled "recycle" and "unrecycle". And when I first visited the Great Wall in 1985 I came away with a souvenir ticket that stated "I have mounted the Great Wall".

Here are some of my other favourites and I will keep this post updated as I spot more.

Hairdressers shop: "Workmanlike Century Scissors"
Noodle restaurant: "Face Maintaining Noodle"
Sign on hotel step: "Caution the Stair"
Sign in hotel bathroom: "Please slip carefully"

Sign on pedestrian walkway:

This one is a boutique!
At an antiques market:
Some poor woman is going to buy this sweater and walk around town in it:

Food and Fireworks

2007-02-21T22:43:00.000+08:00

It is now the 4th day of the year of the pig. I love the fact that at this time of year people here seem to work only on the lunar calendar and lose track completely of the Gregorian calendar. So if you ask someone when their restaurant will open again after the holiday, and say "will you be open by February 20?" or even "by next Tuesday?", they will really have to think about it and maybe consult a calendar before they figure it out, but they will tell you right off the bat: "we open again on chu ba" (the 8th day of the year).

We decided not to go travelling over the holiday, despite giving serious consideration to a trip to Cambodia and various options inside China. Then we thought we might go ski-ing at the nearest ski mountain, or even just to the wildlife park for the day. But the weather is too warm for much snow and we heard that half the animals at the park recently died.... Plus we decided that everything would be too crowded and too tiring so we ended up staying at home. This may sound unadventurous but it has actually been a very pleasant few days, in which the main attractions have been the food and the fireworks.

On New Year's Eve we went with a big group of friends to a restaurant just outside the city owned by our friend Yong. She bought the place in a scenic area of villages and countryside about 20 minutes drive south of here. The area has been restored and developed as a tourist attraction, with teahouses, artificial lakes, nursery plantations, cute village houses painted all over with giant flowers and other attractions. It is actually quite attractive, although nothing like any genuine village: not enough mud or garbage. We toured the area in a crawling convoy of vehicles, riding with friends who work at the US Consulate in their gigantic Ford 4WD, a vehicle so enormous that we could have driven comfortably right over the top of the entire scenic area without feeling a bump.

We reached the restaurant at around 6, in time for drinks and dinner, which included spit-roast lamb, but that was just a preliminary to the main attraction: noise! As soon as dusk fell the entire village exploded in a firework frenzy. This started with someone accidentally setting off a bunch of fireworks right in the courtyard of the restaurant, causing everyone to jump out of their skins and most of the kids to jump into their parent's arms. After that we nervously settled down to watch a massive display of noise and light that seemed to be coming from the house next door. Our friend Jonny went off to check and reported that this was in fact the case: some guy was lighting them out of his back door and he had 12 more boxes lined up to go.

It was a spectacular display, similar to what you see in New York on July 4th, only right above your head instead of miles away over the Hudson River. But it was too much for Sam, who quivered on my lap, wide-eyed with astonishment. Then people started handing out strings of tiny firecrackers to all the kids and encouraging them to swing them around their heads as they went off! Isaac preferred to hold his gingerly at arms's length, until a man helpfully came along and vigorously swung his arm for him, which ended in tears when a spark caught him on the arm. Sam was also yelping with alarm as the noise-level escalated, so we decided it was time to retreat. As we headed for the car, a small sweet-faced girl of about 7 was purposefully handing out firecrackers to everyone from a huge box.

The children were fine as soon as the noise was on the other side of a window instead of right in their faces. On the way home our friends Cindy and Dave told us that they had been sleeping in the basement of their house all week because of the noise of fireworks right outside their window until 2 every morning. The noise has not been so bad where we live luckily, because we don't have a basement we could retreat to if it was. But that night it was fairly constant, and at midnight the whole city seemed to explode! It's been a similar story ever since; from time to time we run to the windows to catch the latest spectacular display, but we have become blase as the days wear on.

In addition to enjoying the fireworks and hanging out with the children, we have been ordering Chinese take-out this week. This may seem obvious but it is not something we have ever done before here. We either eat at home, western food that I cook, or we go out, usually to eat Chinese food in one of the gazillion restaurants around town, but often to one of the western places. Both Ethan and I were a bit fed up of the western food on offer and hankering for some really good Chinese, but not really wanting to deal with Sam wriggling on our laps and crawling around the greasy floor of a restaurant. So on Tuesday Ethan went out on his bike and came home with a feast. This is what we ate:

- Chilli chicken with peanuts, an old favorite from our student days, hard to beat when it's done properly, although in Sichuan you have to manouevre your way among the Sichuan peppercorns
- chicken soup with gingko nuts, mmmmm, did you know the ginko tree is one of the oldest on the planet and the only surviving one of its genus?
- another chicken dish with mushrooms soaked in tea, sounds wierd but tasted fantastic
- dry-cooked grean beans, another old stand-by, hard to beat
- delicous crunchy green vegetables

It was all so good we decided that we have to make the most of being here and be more adventurous in trying new restaurants and dishes every week. So we did it again tonight, not quite as successfully as the duck was suffering from terminal Sichuan chilli pepper poisoning, but still mostly good! I am going to start a kitchen scrapbook of the best places and dishes we find.

Year of the Golden Fire Pig

2007-02-16T22:55:00.000+08:00

Best wishes to everyone for the year of the pig, which starts on February 18. Not just any old pig either, but a Golden Fire Pig, something that only occurs once every 600 years in the Chinese zodiac. Apparently children born under this sign will live in comfort with wealth and luck always nearby, and as a result hospitals and clinics across China and Korea are seeing a 20-50% increase in pregnant women registering as patients. I was skeptical about this but it turns out that two of Ethan’s Chinese staff are planning to have babies this year! Interestingly, it is a very black year in the Tibetan calendar, one in which they predict terrible things will happen, leading to some discussion between Ethan’s Tibetan and Chinese staff. One of the Tibetans said, “what’s so lucky about pigs anyway? They just get fattened up to be eaten!” You can read more if you care to at www.firepig.com.

Perhaps because it’s a special year, or just because pigs are such a popular animal over here, China has really gone to town with the pig-themed decorations. The whole city is full of pigs: pink fluffy pigs, brassy golden pigs, 20 foot high inflatable pigs - there’s no danger of forgetting what year it is. But at least there are no actual livestock, so far. Two years ago many of our neighbours bought roosters to celebrate the year of the chicken, resulting in a dawn chorus of crowing that gradually diminished as the birds went into the pot. Last year the number of pet dogs around town seemed to increase as well, some no doubt ending up in the same place as the roosters. This year we are assuming the process will not be repeated with pigs as they are not so easy to keep in an apartment, not to mention the possibility of swine fever. Although, that is one of these health scares which, like bird flu, seems to have faded away without becoming the world-wide epidemic it was predicted to be. Fingers crossed. But I do see a pattern emerging here: perhaps these health scares are actually linked not to Chinese farming methods but to the Chinese zodiac? If so, be on the look-out for a rat-related health scare next year …..bubonic plague perhaps?

We are staying here in Chengdu for the holiday and it will be nice to have a quiet week at home. Very quiet in fact as many people leave the city and go home to the countryside. However, the people who do stay in the city will be setting off a lot of fireworks, so when it's noisy, it's really noisy. The streets are already noticeably emptier, especially compared to the hectic bustle of the past few weeks, when everyone was frantically shopping for gifts and new clothes to take home. It's traditional for everyone to have a new outfit for the new year, although Xiao Long's daughter is only having new sneakers this year because she did not do as well as usual in her end of term exams. She only scored 85% on her mathematics exam, which is apparently bordering on disgraceful.

Xiao Long has gone home for two weeks. At the beginning of the week I felt a bit overwhelmed to be back in full-time housework and childcare mode, but I am really enjoying hanging out with the boys. They are still getting along great guns, despite the odd territorial skirmish. Sam has just started walking and staggers along with both hands held out in front like a miniature Egyptian Mummy in a horror film. Isaac has taught him to respond to the question “where’s Mama?” by sticking his finger up his nose, which Isaac thinks is the funniest thing on the planet, and that makes Sam scream with laughter as well. Of course he responds to “where’s Dada?” or Isaac or Ayi by pointing at the correct person.

Right now Sam can say about equal numbers of English and Chinese words, a handful of each, to the immense pride of our housekeeper or “ayi”, Xiao Long, who gives him intensive coaching on the Chinese side. He can’t pronounce ‘m’ so he calls me baba instead of mama and this confuses the heck out of everyone because it is Chinese for Daddy. So we get a lot of conversations like these:

Xiao Long: "Sam, say Mama"
Sam: "Baba"
XL: "No, not Baba, Baba's not here, say Mama"
Sam: "Baba!"
Isaac: "Sam, where's Mama?"
Sam sticks finger up nose. General hilarity.

It’s interesting to see how the first words differ in the two languages. Leaving aside mama and dada, in English Sam can say dog, bee, apple, moo and Buddha (see below!). In Chinese he can say ayi (aunty), che (car), yu (fish), ge-ge (older brother) and jie-jie (older sister). Note that three out of the 5 are terms of address for people. This is important because from birth children here learn to address other children by one of four terms: ge-ge (older brother), jie-jie (older sister), di-di (younger brother) or mei-mei (younger sister). This is not just for family members but for every child: friend or stranger. When your child meets another child you are supposed to say “call her mei-mei” or “call him ge-ge” and the child learns to dutifully pipe up “mei-mei” or whatever. The same applies to adults: you teach your child to address them as aunty, uncle, grandma, grandpa etc. But I find the terms of address for children especially interesting because they require the child to look at the other person and decide whether he or she is older or younger, and that determines the nature of the relationship. You have to think: is this person an “older brother” who is going to look after me and I have to show some respect to, or a “younger sister” whom I have to look after? It’s all part of the Confucian social hierarchy and you carry on doing it all your life, to some extent. Although of course rules are made to be broken, even in China.

You may be wondering why one of Sam’s first words is “Buddha”. We are as well to be honest. He says it many times a day: “booo-daaaa”, grinning and staring up at the bronze Buddha statue on top of the bookshelf. Now, there are two interpretations of this. One is that it is an easy word to say and he enjoys the enthusiastic reaction it gets from us. The other is that sometime soon a big Tibetan Lama is going to walk in here and declare him the reincarnation of another big Tibetan Lama and whisk him off to a monastery for the rest of his days. I’ll keep you posted.

Old Foreigners: Exceed the Birth Quota and Own Too Much Stuff

2007-02-09T15:10:00.000+08:00

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

Little Dragon Soap

2006-09-26T22:51:00.000+08:00

Our ayi or housekeeper’s surname Long means dragon, and we call her Xiao Long: Little Dragon. She is one of my main sources of information about day-to-day life in Chengdu. In fact if I’m honest she is my major interface with Chinese culture, as I spend a large part of every day with her and talk to her far more than any other Chinese person. Luckily she is not bad company and she speaks good Mandarin, so I have no trouble understanding her. Conversation is challenging with people who only speak Sichuanese dialect: our neighbor’s former housekeeper used to make critical observations whenever we met in the corridor, but I couldn’t get upset because I was never really sure what she was talking about. Xiao-long on the other hand considers herself something of an expert on the weirdness of foreigners and doesn’t let our strange habits faze her at all. She worked for an American family before and several of her sisters-in-law do also, it seems to be something of a clan occupation and I know they compare notes on us all.

Anyway Xiao Long seems very happy working for us and we are happy to have her. She is a competent, cheerful person and she adores Sam. However she loves to gossip and she does have a bossy streak. She keeps me up-to-date on how much I am overpaying for everything (20 cents a pound for pears instead of 10!) and how inadequately dressed Sam is for the weather conditions. When she takes Sam out to play in the gardens she catches up on the local gossip and reports it back to me with real enthusiasm and concern for those involved. For example, a recent upheaval in the building occurred when the sixth floor neighbor’s ayi returned from a visit to her family in the countryside to find all her belongings piled up outside her employer’s front door. She had stayed away a few days longer than had been agreed and had been given the sack. Xiao Long came across her weeping in the hallway and was filled with righteous indignation on her behalf. “That’s what Chinese people are like”, she told me, “they’re tough. She has raised their son day in and day out for two years and they dump her without a second thought”. But a few days later I saw the 6th floor ayi was back again in charge of little Dou-dou. When I asked Xiao-long she reported with satisfaction that the boy had screamed for his ayi all day and all night until his mother had relented and called her to return.

Xiao Long also shares some of the ups and downs of her life with us and I have to say there are plenty of them. So far this year her husband was hospitalized with heatstroke, her mother had major surgery, a close friend had some kind of stroke or brain hemorrhage and her best friend jumped off a bridge. She survived, thank goodness, as she was pulled out of the river by an elderly watchman who happened to see her take the plunge. Xiao Long was worried for her friend but a little amused as she told me the story, “it’s terrible” she said “but it does have a funny side as well. She was saved by a little old man older than her Dad!” We already knew that the friend, Xiao Wu’s life was difficult because Xiao Long often compared it with her own, shaking her head in disapproval at Xiao Wu’s husband’s gambling and drinking habits. Although he drives a taxi on the night-shift, he contrives to bring home only 1,000 yuan per month (about $120) while his best friend, Xiao Long’s husband, brings home more than 5,000 (about $620) despite working the same hours. 1,000 is a stretch for two people to live on so Xiao Wu is under pressure to go out to work, whereas Xiao Long often tells me that she does not really need to work but she likes to get out of the house. “What am I going to do at home all day? Play Mah-jong? What a waste of time!” While I can see her point, I am still mystified that she chooses to come and wash our dishes for $100 a month.

However I am very glad that she does and maybe the fact that she is choosing to do it is what keeps her so cheerful all the time. Most of the ayis in our compound live with their employers and only go home for a few days once a month. Their husbands are often migrant laborers as well, so if they have children they are left in the care of relatives. By contrast Xiao Long and her husband are upwardly mobile. They both have residence papers for Chengdu, they have recently bought their own apartment and last year they moved their 8 year old daughter from her grandparent’s home to the city to live with them. Selfishly, I’m happy that we are not employing someone who is separated from her family and desperate for the wages, as it would make me feel guilty. Instead I am happy to sit and chat with Xiao Long and take her advice about what price to pay for fruit and how to cut up a pineapple.

The neighbourhood

2006-09-25T10:55:00.000+08:00

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.

Looking back to November 04

2006-09-18T10:36:00.000+08:00

16 months after I started this blog I am finally posting again. The delay is mostly down to the fact that it has not been possible to access my blog from China. But now it is. Who knows why or for how long. So I am backdating a little bit and adding some posts from newsletters I have written to friends and family.

Here is a very early one from October 2004:

We have been living in the city of Chengdu in south-west China for three weeks, and in that time Isaac has eaten nothing but strawberry jam sandwiches. OK, the occasional bowl of plain pasta and once or twice a pork dumpling have sneaked into his mouth, but nothing else. This is one of several forms of mute protest about his situation. Perhaps ‘mute’ gives a misleading impression of quiet: we don’t get much of that in our household at the best of times and in a crowded city of 8 million people and several hundred construction sites it is an even rarer commodity.

What I mean is that he is not actively vocalizing his disapproval about being here.
In fact most of the time he seems quite happy to hang out at the playground with the Chinese pre-schoolers or go apartment-hunting with Ethan and I. We have tried to keep his routine as similar to home as possible, despite the 3 am starts and unexpected naps brought on by jetlag. It helps that we are staying with our wonderful friends Lin and Huang Mei in their large, comfortable apartment, rather than in a hotel. Isaac loves playing with their 18-month old son Yang-yang and his large collection of plastic semi-automatic weapons. Access to toy weapons is one aspect of life in China that has Isaac positively excited. Spitting is another, I’m sad to say. It’s hard to convince a four-year old boy that spitting on the street is not acceptable behavior when he sees it all around him all the time. This morning he announced, “I like copying Chinese people I don’t know and spitting on the ground”, then proceeded to give a convincing demonstration, sound effects and all.

But despite these excitements, the protests persist. In addition to the eating protest, there is the walking protest. Since we arrived he has refused to walk more than 10 yards at a stretch. He either parks his bottom firmly in the stroller or stretches his arms up to be carried, with a plaintive plea that takes me straight back to toddler days. It’s endearing to be reminded of that stage and to have those little arms wrapped around my neck again. Well, it is for about the first 5 yards, until my own lumbar protest starts up. So I have taken to bringing the stroller with us everywhere we go, much to the amazement of local people. Strollers are starting to gain popularity here, (along with many other previously unobtainable western trappings of parenthood, like diapers), but pretty much only for babies. Isaac is the only kid in town who can lob a spit-ball and handle a plastic shot-gun, but expects to be wheeled home afterwards.

Finally we have the speaking protest. This is not so much about speaking as being spoken to. He is not so bad with people we know, especially if they speak English, but he really does not like strangers addressing him in Chinese. I do understand this, he is still mastering English after all, and suddenly he is surrounded by people talking to him in another incomprehensible tongue. He calls English ‘Ditchling language’ after the small village in England where we lived last year and which he still considers home, despite vague memories of his ‘black and white house’ in New Jersey where he spent the first two and a half years of his life. So he will say, “I like Lin Shu-shu (Uncle Lin) because he talks to me in Ditchling language” or “that girl said hello to me in Ditchling language!”

The Chinese dote on children and pay them a lot of attention anyway, but a small blond one stands out a mile. Nearly everyone we pass smiles at Isaac and many of them stop to say how cute he is (they use the word ‘guai’, which means endearing and obedient, the two concepts being interconnected in their minds - at least until they encounter Isaac). The problem is that many also reach out to stroke his head or pat his cheek. He hates this, as indeed would I, and he responds with a loud and furious scream or by poking or pushing or spitting at them. They then change their opinion and back off with an embarrassed laugh or a comment about the rowdy behavior of western kids. “Why don’t they speak DITCHLING LANGUAGE?”, Isaac asked me in tears yesterday, and I explained again that we are in China now and people speak a different language, that they are only being friendly when they talk to him or touch him, that he will soon learn to speak Chinese himself. We talk about it a lot and will carry on doing so, whilst also trying to pre-empt the head-patting as much as possible.

I’m not too worried about the protests though, they are all reasonable enough reactions to an overwhelming deluge of change and I am sure they will pass. But we do agonize over whether living here will have any longer-term impact on Isaac’s social and emotional development. As our plane touched down on the runway three weeks ago, I made a fervent wish that we should all leave in two years time in good physical and mental health; that Isaac would not suffer from the culture shock he was about to be plunged into or, worse, fall prey to one of the myriad hazards that haunt me – the potholed street, the lurching truck, the random avian-flu carrying crow. Some variation of this is every parent’s daily prayer, I know, but it comes with a little added fervor in a country where, at any intersection, a top-heavy motorcycle may bear down on you loaded with lead-piping, or sofas, or pigs.

Being here does add unwelcome layers of risk: I am scared that one element or more could go alarmingly, unpredictably wrong and bring the whole house of cards down around our ears. But the potential gains are great as well, from the work and from everyday life. Isaac, and maybe even Ethan and I, may become a little wiser and more compassionate as a result of the experiences that lie ahead of us.

Re-reading these I realise that I did not jump into this experience in an entirely positive frame of mind! Here is another, somewhat more upbeat one, from November 2004:

It is a beautiful sunny day in Chengdu, one of only a handful we have seen since we arrived. Blue sky does lift the spirits but, as a friend commented this morning, it won’t do to make plans on days like these. You have to remember the dreary, overcast, polluted reality of most days and plan accordingly - e.g. for a long holiday somewhere else. Perhaps I am not getting started on the most positive note, but I might as well tell it like it is. The climate and the air quality are two of the least attractive things about life in Chengdu. I’ll get on to some of the others later.

Exactly ten weeks ago I submitted my MA thesis and the next day we heard that Winrock International had got the grant they had applied for from USAID, Ethan was appointed Chief of Party and we would be moving to China where he would run development projects with Tibetan communities in Western Sichuan. Since then we have packed up our lives in England, raced back to the US, cleaned and painted our house, moved all our belongings into storage and turned our lives around to come here, all while Ethan was starting work on his new job. All of this only made possible by the logistical and moral support of family and friends – thank-you all! The good news is that we have survived, though we’ve had a bumpy old time of it now and then. But we are here, in our own place and slowly starting to feel more settled. We have rented an apartment and made it more or less functional, Ethan has worked all the hours God sends, Isaac has started to attend the local Chinese kindergarten and learned how to say ‘silly potato’ in Chinese.

We are living on the 6th floor in a modern apartment complex in the south of the city, close to the area where most foreigners live, but not too close. Jinguan New City consists of 12 high-rise blocks and a bunch of villas set in landscaped gardens. It’s a great location, within walking distance of all essential amenities such as Peter’s Tex-Mex Cafe and the Carrefour supermarket, as well as a vegetable market, post office etc. I also just discovered this week that there is an Austrian bakery, indoor heated swimming pool, sauna and gym in the clubhouse so I am definitely feeling that we made the right choice about where to live. The apartment itself is large and light and airy, a rarity in this gloomy city, and that was its major selling point. It also boasts a huge, mauve-flowered sofa, stripy tinsel curtains and an odd, moulded-plastic bathtub with jet sprays that squirt you in the neck as you squirm to fit your body into the odd contours, whilst not sitting on the pop-up bathplug that is absurdly situated right under your bottom. But once our shipment arrives and we make a few décor adjustments it should start to feel like home. Already, even with those curtains, it is a peaceful haven from the hubbub outside

It is a very impressive hubbub, I have to say. The first few days we were here I couldn’t stop thinking about the first time I came to China in autumn 1985 and comparing everything. It is fascinating to come back and live here again, very different from coming on work trips, and a great chance to experience China again at this later stage of our lives. In very many ways it is a different country from the place where Ethan and I were students in the 1980s. When Ethan was studying in Shanghai he once went to a Chinese family’s home for dinner, but they disguised him as he came and went in case any of the neighbours spotted him and got them into trouble. This time we stayed in the home of Chinese friends for three weeks and no-one batted an eyelid. And the home we stayed in was a large duplex apartment with 4 bathrooms and a roof garden. In the 1980s even a penniless foreign student was wealthy compared to all but the most privileged Chinese people. Now only the wealthiest ex-pats can keep up with middle-class Chinese spending habits. People have got rich and, as Deng Xiao-ping promised them, it is glorious. When I was a student in Bejing the only shop that stocked imported goods or anything that you really wanted to buy was the Friendship Store. Chinese people weren’t even allowed in the door. Now the streets of Chengdu are lined with international brand names: Nike, Prada, Ermenegildno Zegna. Imported goods aren’t really necessary, however, because everything is made in China anyway. Thinking about the economic and lifestyle changes in the last 20 years and imagining a similar rate of change continuing for the next 20 years, I have to agree with those who say that this will be China’s century. Or rather, by the end of the century this will be China’s world.

But for now there are many remnants of the old socialist China around, quite apart from the communist party itself. The quarantine hospital where Ethan had the health tests for his residence permit may use disposable needles, but not disposable gloves to wield them. Hey, they don’t even use disposable tongue depressors. Waitresses still occasionally tell you that an item isn’t available because they can’t be bothered to go and check. Young men still cycle past you on the street calling out ‘helloooooooo’ in high-pitched voices. Buildings still pretty much fall down or at least look horribly tacky within a few years of construction. There are still a gazillion peasants out there in the countryside. For all the money being thrown around, most people are still horribly poor. The road leading to Isaac’s kindergarten passes by a piece of wasteland piled with construction rubble and trash. Around the 20th time I walked past I realized that the wasteland contains rows of tumble-down shacks where the construction crew actually live. They may be busy building ‘French-style’ town-homes but they live in a garbage heap.

That brings me on to the kindergarten, a major feature of Isaac’s and my life. We decided to send him to a local kindergarten so that he can be in a Chinese language environment and hopefully will learn to speak fairly quickly. It is certainly an impressive-looking place, a purpose-built three storey building with large playground and great facilities. It is one of an exclusive chain, the ‘Golden Apple All-The-Way’ Kindergartens (don’t ask), and the teachers do seem smart and very nice. But it is a big challenge of adjustment for Isaac, as he has to adapt to a lot more than just the language. The attitude to education and to young children is so different here - they are on the one hand more cosseted and on the other hand more restricted than in the west. One of my theories is that in the west we control the environment around children: childproofing our homes and play areas and then letting them run around as they will. Here the environment is beyond people’s control, full of unexpected hazards, and so people control their children much more closely. Kids here learn early on to stick close to their parents and do as they are told. Probably Isaac could do with a little more of that spirit, I hear you say. I certainly felt that way on the day he disappeared down the up escalator into a crowd of people. But most of the time his curious, adventurous nature is a joy to be around and we don’t want to curb that. The emphasis at his kindergarten is on group activities, rote learning and following social convention. A lot of time is spent on group dance routines, all the kids standing on their designated spots, waving their arms and hands in time to the music, or pretending to be little flowers or whatever. Isaac just isn’t getting it and I can hardly blame him. But this stuff is so deeply ingrained in most Chinese people that some adults, when they see Isaac or another kindergartner, experience a sort of Pavlovian return to their early childhood, their eyes glazing over as they start a rhymic hand-clapping, head-bobbing kind of dance.

Isaac continutes to resent the attention he receives. Everyone who sees him says he is ‘guai’, a Chinese word meaning sweet, endearing AND obedient. Then they try to stroke his head or pat his cheek, he responds by poking or pushing or spitting at them, and they change their opinion. He takes refuge against the unfamiliar in stories and is always asking Ethan when he is around, or me when he is not, to tell him the rest of the story. So we have various adventure sagas on the go, mostly featuring Isaac as a warrior or sailor or explorer or some other intrepid figure, doing good deeds and battling the forces of darkness.

We worry about the transition of course, and what impact it will have on him, but on the whole he seems to be handling it quite well. We spend a lot of time at home with familiar toys and games or outside running around, and the kindergarten is getting easier, I think. Although he clings to me every morning, he seems very cheerful when I go to pick him up and the teachers say he is getting along well with the other kids and hitting fewer people every day! So we will see. If it doesn’t work out, the alternative is a small international school where Isaac already goes to Wushu classes. We have met some Western kids there and one, a 5 year-old German girl, lives in our complex and plays with Isaac at the weekends. He is totally in love with her and wants her to come and live with us so they can play his charming game called ‘shooting other people’ all the time.

I realize I haven’t said much about what we are actually doing here. For my part that is because, as an ex-pat housewife, my main concern is how well the Amah has dusted behind the sofa. I have joined the Chengdu International Women’s Club so I can really get to grips with this issue. I also spend a fair amount of time gazing at pig carcasses, wondering which part translates into a pork chop, then giving up and buying bean curd instead. My other misadventures have included having my wallet stolen, and getting locked out on our balcony and having to be rescued by a security guard shinning up the drainpipe from the floor below. Apart from that most of my attention is focused on Isaac, as you can tell from the contents of this letter. I do occasionally remember that just a few weeks ago I was busy writing essays with titles like, ‘Constructing Community in Place, Process and Population’, but for now that is mostly eclipsed by all the hours spent playing ‘Buzz Lightyear blasts the space robots to smithereens’. Nevertheless, around all that excitement I am starting to make time to pursue some projects of my own.

Anyhow here we are and will be for the next two years. We have a guest room and are hoping for lots of visitors, so if I haven’t put you off completely, plan ahead and book yourselves in now for your China vacation. There are lots of great things to see in Sichuan and we are only a few hours away from the spectacular mountains and grasslands of the Tibetan plateau. And we promise not to make you eat Sichuan hot pot more than once.

What are we doing here?

2005-05-16T12:01:00.000+08:00

Two years ago if I had been answering that question, I would have said that Ethan and I work on development projects with Tibetan communities in China. Since then, however, I have completed an MA in the Anthropology of Development and Social Transformation and nothing will ever be that simple again. Now the very mention of the word 'development' raises a horde of questions: whose development are we talking about, who decides what consitutes development and by what measure is it a good thing anyway? Read James Ferguson's "The Anti-Politics Machine" and you will never be able to say or write the word without quotation marks again. And let me not get started on the word 'community'. But that is why I did the MA in the first place, so that after 7 years working in the field I could take the time to ask these questions and ponder some of their answers.

It is a little ironic then, that after all the questioning we both did (because Ethan did most of the reading with me and had already done all the thinking and plenty more in his own anthropology graduate studies and had spent his 7 years working in development posing these sort of questions, at some personal cost because, let's face it, few people working in development want to question the fundamental worth of their activities), here we are back in China in the service of one of the biggest of all development agencies.

That is, Ethan is working for Winrock International as Chief of Party on a project funded by USAID, to strengthen Tibetan communities’ capacity for meeting their socio-economic needs, while conserving the environment and preserving their cultural heritage. I am not working officially, although a suprising amount of my time goes into helping out here and there with editing this or discussing that.

So why did we get into this again if we think it is all a waste of time? If so much ‘development’ work leads nowhere, spending a lot of money but leaving its intended beneficiaries no better off, only perhaps a little less themselves, a little bit more just like the rest of the world? The answer must be that we don't think this is inevitable, that it is still possible to achieve something. I didn't come out of my degree with a totally cynical perspective on development, just a much more cautious one. I believe that any person or organisation setting out to 'develop' people in a different country needs to rigorously question what they are doing, to set it in historial and cultural context, to work as much as is humanly possible from a local perspective.

Ethan has been working in the area for 20 years, speaks the languages, is as culturally aware as anyone can be. He also has many local friends who are keen on the project and willing to work with him. And this opportunity did have something of a karmic feel to it: back in China, back working on development with Tibetan communities. It felt like the right thing to do. Now we just have to make it worthwhile.