A 'Bad China Day'

Every expat over here has a 'bad China day' from time to time. Even the ones who are most in love with the country, the ones most "in touch with the culture", the ones wearing the spectacles with the deepest rosy hue. Sometimes you get whole sequences of them together, and you start to wonder whether every day isn't a 'bad China day'. At that point, you should probably leave.

It hasn't happened to me yet, and I don't think it will - but I have had some rough times here. This time of the year, in fact, is always particularly bad: work is slow to pick up after the two or three months of disruption caused by Christmas, New Year, and the Chinese Spring Festival following so closely on one another; dwindling savings start to jeopardize your plans for a summer holiday back home; trying to find something more stable and permanent in the employment line for next year is a perennially fruitless task, yet each year there will be new illusory possibilities to taunt you briefly with the prospect of security, before ambushing you once again with disappointment; and then, of course, just around the corner is the annual or semi-annual ordeal of visa renewal (a topic for another time, I think).

You see, all of these examples are fairly specific to the situation in China; so, when stuff like this happens to you, you can justifiably say "China gives you a hard time sometimes". I was cruising around some of the 'China blogs' last week (just to reassure myself how worthless most of them are), and found quite a few examples of the 'bad China day' story. Except that NONE of them really were. "I lost some money." "I've got a bitch of a cold." "I got some bad news from home." "My girlfriend dumped me." "My mobile phone's broken." Hello, people - that shit isn't China-specific at all; that shit happens everywhere. When you have a day where a lot of things like that go wrong for you, that's just a shitty day, it's not a 'bad China day'.

Trust me on this, I know about 'bad China days'. When you discover - by chance, at the very last moment - that 3 of the next 4 one-day-a-week teaching gigs you have at a private high school are cancelled for various obscure reasons that you could not possibly have foreseen, and you weren't told because the headmaster doesn't give a damn about your existence unless you miss a class, and, this being January and you having no other work at all on at the moment, you could otherwise have taken a nice holiday - that's a 'bad China day'. When a teaching colleague of yours becomes mentally unwell, and your employer summarily sacks him, and kicks him out of his accommodation without paying the return half of his airfare reimbursement, and revokes his visa, and he turns up on your doorstep gibbering and weeping and begging for succour on the eve of one of the week-long national holidays - that's a 'bad China day'. When your best friend gets attacked by a murderous psychopath with a hatchet, and then the taxi driver doesn't want to take you to the hospital because he's worried about getting his seat covers messy - that's a 'bad China day'.

Just this weekend, I had what threatened to be a more minor kind of 'bad China day'. I went to get a haircut at my usual barbershop - and they gave me shit. I go there every month or two. My Chinese is lousy, their English is lousy, but they know me, we get along (this is one of those situations where I am very sceptical as to whether it is much help to learn Chinese; I don't think any of my Chinese-speaking foreign friends could really hold their own in conversation with a hairdresser). Except this Saturday - they're blooding a new boy, so none of the guys who've cut my hair before are coming anywhere near me. The new boy is a bundle of nerves. He thinks he's got to somehow force me to have the hairwash first, for the extra few RMB - even though I never do that, even though it's obvious I've just washed my hair. Then he wants detailed instructions on the cut in Chinese. When he doesn't get them, he retires in a panic, and has to be goaded by the more experienced cutters into coming back to get started. He's not too bad once he finally gets going, although the 'tidying up' threatens to take forever. And he seems to keep wanting to completely fuck up my parting (I discourage him, gently but firmly). I have explained at the outset (I have just about this much Chinese, although pointing and miming usually works just fine) that I have somewhere else to go and that I expect 10-15 minutes to be plenty of time to complete the cut. He takes nearer 25 - and would have taken 25 more if left to his own devices. I have been through this rigmarole countless times before, but it is still kind of irritating - especially when you're in a hurry. And it doesn't usually happen at this shop - I thought they knew me there now!

So, it's now the middle of the afternoon, and I want to take a taxi to the centre of town to catch an art exhibition. Ordinarily, this is a great city for taxis: there is a generous over-supply of them, and you very seldom have to wait more than 30 seconds to flag one down. Not this afternoon, however. It's quite a warm day, so perhaps people are taking cabs even for very short hops, to avoid getting too sweaty (this does become a serious factor during the summer; many cabbies are reluctant to take you on long journeys, because they can make more money with multiple short, minimum-fare trips when the weather is very hot). A couple of vacant cabs go by, but don't want to stop for me. I HATE it when that happens. Eventually, after nearly 5 minutes, I get a cab. I get one of the new drivers, bit of a dipshit, doesn't know his way around the city; if I had more time, and the cab situation were better, I'd probably get out and try to find another, but..... I figure I'll take my chances. I get distracted by a phone call from a friend. I've never been to this gallery by taxi before anyway (it's walkable from my apartment, but I'm running late). The driver thinks he's somewhere near, and keeps asking me if he should stop. I'm getting tired of this. I think he's somewhere near too. I tell him to stop. Fuck it - it's probably another half a mile or so, but I'll walk.

I don't know any of the street names in this part of town, and I'm rather further away than I thought I was. Also, I manage to miss the right turning (because the names of the streets change quite unnecessarily every block or two, and sometimes even on the same block, depending on which street sign you're looking at - another rather China-specific or Beijing-specific problem), and end up walking in a big circle all around the place until I finally find it. This wouldn't be so bad if the city blocks weren't a mile or two long (another very Beijing-specific problem).

So, I arrive at the National Art Museum Of China (or Namoc, as they like to abbreviate it - sounds like a character in The Lord Of The Rings to me!) to catch the penultimate day of the big 'History of American Art' show - and I find that two-thirds of it has already been packed up; only the landscapes of the American West on the 3rd Floor are still on show. This seems to happen a lot at Namoc: only three of its multiple floors actually have display space, and every damn time I go there two of them will be closed. Still, you don't expect such a major exhibition as this to close a day early.

So, yes, that was shaping up to be a pretty 'bad China day' (and there was some more to come later), but..... you know what? I found I didn't really give a damn. I am too well inured to these petty annoyances now: you can't keep letting them get on top of you. And I know how to balance blame: it was partly, perhaps mostly my fault that the barber got so nervous around me, that I couldn't give the taxi driver better directions, that I couldn't find my way there on foot, that I missed part of the exhibition (heck, I've known it was on this past month, and have kept on not getting around to going to see it for the 2 or 3 previous weekends).

And above all, it was such a gorgeous day. Clear blue skies, bright sunshine, refreshing breezes, trees everywhere heavy with blossom. It's very difficult to stay in a grump for long in such conditions - instead, this became a 'good China day'. It's worth reminding ourselves that we do get quite a few of those as well.