Bon mot for the week

"Nobody is an atheist when the brakes fail."

Froog

Wot, no poem?

Well, yes, there is - but this week it's over on The Barstool.

I would also call your attention to the back page of this month's Time Out Beijing (not available on the website, sadly), which carries an excellent obituary for Ian Sherman, the magazine's much-missed rock music critic.

List of the Month - Chinese friends

And how I came by them...

Kai Pan over on the always interesting CN Reviews blog had a particularly provocative post the other day titled Expats In China Don't Need To Make Chinese Friends. I was prompted to leave quite a long comment on the thread - which got 'eaten' by the system (Dang! I hate it when that happens! Always, always, always copy to clipboard before hitting 'submit'.).

There are many interesting issues to consider within this topic, and I'll leave most of them to other posts. Kai offered the critical, challenging observation that many foreigners here seem to socialize very little with local Chinese, and to have few if any Chinese friends - at least, not really close friends. (Unfortunately, he rather invited the derailment of his comment-thread by throwing in a jibe about the prevalence of foreign guys having Chinese wives/girlfriends - a phenomenon I mentioned here in passing just the other week.)

I might at some other time ponder on the various cultural factors that limit the amount of socializing most laowai do with Chinese people, and make it difficult to form or maintain deep friendships. There is an intriguing question of gender imbalance: I think expats - of both sexes - tend to have far more female Chinese friends than male ones (that's certainly true in my own case - even though I do not in general find Chinese girls especially attractive sexually, and have never yet had a Chinese girlfriend). I might also have a post or two in me on the nature of friendship, on its gradations (I think I probably have only 2 or 3 really close attachments that I've made in Beijing with non-Chinese; most of my lifelong confidant/soulmate relationships go back at least a dozen or so years, the majority of them in fact 20 years or more). Ah yes, and then there's the moral question underlying Kai's post: is it wrong to have few or no Chinese friends, must we try harder to make some?

I think Kai's implication that many, perhaps most foreigners in China socialize with the Chinese hardly at all, outside of work/business or wives/girlfriends, is unfair. It does not accord with my experience. I believe he's based in Shanghai, and perhaps things are different down there. Even in Beijing, I can see that it's often true of a certain sort of expat: some of the long-term expats who've been here 15 or 20 years dabbling in various business schemes do seem to fit that mould; and the Shunyi-ites, the MNC managers with the fat remuneration packages who live with their families in gated communities far out of the city, cocooning themselves in a facsimile of a middle American suburb. But that's not the majority of expats here. Most of the people I know prefer activities and entertainment venues where they are likely to encounter a vibrant mix of foreigners and locals. Most foreigners I know have a good number of Chinese friends, including at least one or two really close ones.

When I was reviewing the numbers listed in the address book of my mobile phone a little while ago, I was quite gratified to confirm that well over half of them are under Chinese names. OK, a good number of those are work contacts. And quite a few are overseas Chinese. But still, I do have a significant proportion of mainland Chinese friends here, nearly 50%. (In my e-mail address lists, it's probably at least 70% or 80% - but they're mostly 'acquaintances' rather than 'friends'.)

So, how does one make Chinese friends? Where do my friends come from?

Work

I remain on close terms with a number of teaching colleagues and administrators from the various organizations I've worked for. There are two I'm particularly fond of: a fellow teacher at one of the universities I used to work at (though she's now moved on to become a tour guide) and the office manager of a foreign training company (a job I helped her to get).

Former students

I'm a cheerful and outgoing sort of chap, so I generally establish a very affectionate bond with the people I teach. My relationship with the first group of students I taught in Beijing became especially close, because of the very intensive nature of the teaching (two classes of 20 students in their late teens, who I was teaching every day, and living alongside for 9 months) and the peculiar stresses we were under (SARS, and a more-than-usually horrible school). I've kept in touch with most of them by e-mail subsequently, and still quite often see the few of them who now live in Beijing. There are a handful of ex-students from my time teaching at universities that I keep in touch with too (all girls, as it happens; but there is a massive preponderance of girls studying arts subjects, especially in the 'teaching' universities). Most of my teaching subsequently has been with adults. It's usually been harder to bond enduringly with students like this because I'm only seeing them once or twice a week, and usually only for quite short periods. However, a few of these I would now count amongst my closest Chinese friends: a TV news editor, a scarily high-ranking policeman, a former architect turned property investment broker (who I helped to prepare for his MBA applications/interviews, and who later became my flatmate for six months), and a couple of department heads at the leading American IT company where I used to be the in-house training co-ordinator.

Networking events

Now, here's a situation where there tends to be an especially high ratio of women to men! Nevertheless, I do meet some interesting guys at this kind of thing from time to time: I am especially glad to have made the acquaintance of Ben, a young entrepreneur who is the brightest person I have met in China.

Friends of friends

I'm very interested in the modern art and rock music scenes here, and through foreign friends involved in those areas I have been lucky enough to be introduced to - and occasionally become friends with - some of the most interesting, creative, and unconventional Chinese folks in the city. And my oldest, dearest Chinese friend is the wife of the university buddy I came here to visit 15 years ago.

Hanging out in bars

Since this is my favourite leisure activity (I have an entire blog devoted to it!), it is hardly surprising that this is how I make most of my friends, of whatever nationality. A fair few of my male Chinese friends are barmen, bar managers, bar owners. And over the past couple of years, I have made a number of good friends, both Chinese and foreign, through the shared love of the game of pool (in the coolest little neighbourhood bar in the capital).

So, yep, one way and another, I have quite a lot of Chinese friends. And I don't think I'm at all untypical. I'd say the same is true - perhaps even more so - for most of the foreigners I know here. There may still be a question as to how many of these Chinese friends could be counted in the very closest circle of friendship (I would have said one, perhaps; but we have rather lost touch since his job required him to relocate first to Hong Kong and then to Shanghai; and I'm bummed that he didn't invite me to his wedding last year!). There are all sorts of reasons why it is hard to achieve that ultimate level of intimacy with a Chinese person.... but I'll leave that discussion to another day.



Addendum: Well, I never did get around to writing the contemplated follow-up post on this - although, in reviewing this a few years on, I realise I did touch on most of the peripheral points I'd wanted to cover about the nature of friendship (and the difficulty of establishing really close friendships with the Chinese) in this post, or in subsequent comments below.

One unusual practical difficulty in maintaining Chinese friendships is the extraordinary volatility - and mobility - in the employment market here. People job-hop like crazy: especially in their first few years out of college, young Chinese seem to think nothing of changing jobs at least once a year, sometimes even within a few months (they're not in thrall to our Western notion that you have to stick something out for at least two or three years to prove you've got loyalty and staying power!). And even a bit later on into their careers, it seems to be quite common for people to jump every two or three years. It has frequently been a problem for me in winning repeat contracts for training seminars that the HR director who first hired me has moved on somewhere else less than a year later (strangely often, in fact, before I've even finished delivering the initial contract!).

And of course, when people switch jobs, they quite often switch cities as well. I suppose most of the well-educated high-achievers I get to meet aspire to have a chance to work overseas - or, in many cases, to emigrate permanently. Most of those that stay in China will gravitate to more commercially vibrant centres like Shanghai, Guangzhou, or Hong Kong.

This high level of mobility conspires with an unfortunate distaste for using e-mail. I don't think the Chinese like using e-mail even in their own language (perhaps because it can be slightly laborious writing characters via a keyboard); they're certainly highly resistant to using it in English. They all seem to prefer the IM format (the predominant platform here is called QQ), which I've never got into. It took me a while to twig just how big a problem this is, but... one of the main reasons I haven't been able to maintain many long-term Chinese friendships is that the Chinese rely mostly on their work e-mail address, they switch jobs every year or two, and they seldom if ever remember to notify their address book contacts of their new work e-mail. It is an exasperating phenomenon: I've lost touch with dozens of people this way.

A more general cultural obstacle, I think, is that Chinese folks just don't fit in with Western styles of socialising. They expect parties to be highly structured, rather than free-form minglers; they like to have formal introductions to anyone they don't know; lots of organised activities, so that they won't be left having to make too much small talk; a timetable! They don't get on well with the much looser Western concept of a party, and will often be reluctant to attend unless they can bring a gaggle of their own friends with them.

They're not comfortable with Western bar culture either - whether it's because it's so alien to their experience or expectations within the culture they grew up with, or because many of them (regardless of experience) have an extremely low, often non-existent, physical tolerance to alcohol, or because they have too little disposable income to be able to afford a long evening in a bar. Even the few Chinese that do try to accommodate themselves to this lifestyle (it's become very trendy during the Nineties and Noughties, especially amongst university students and young professionals) tend not to drink nearly as much as most Westerners. And, as I noted in this post on my 'bar blog', Chinese taste in bars is radically different to that of Westerners - with the result that the great majority of bars, whether by accident or design, become almost exclusively Western or exclusively Chinese. [I prefer those bars that manage to achieve a good blend of the two communities in their custom, but it's a difficult trick to pull off; and it seems to be becoming increasingly rare.]

The Chinese concept of socialising seems to be exclusively restricted to eating out (which I love; but it can't be your only social outlet, every night of the week!), nightclubs and karaoke (which I hate).

There are other cultural incompatibilities as well: a typical ignorance or naivety - and often a deadening lack of curiosity - about life outside of China; a common 'chip on shoulder' insecurity about China's place in the world, and an attendant hair-trigger sensitivity on certain political issues (it is rather depressing how even quite educated and enlightened young Chinese, who often seem to be refreshingly open-minded about things like tolerance of homosexuality or calls for democratic reform and human rights improvements in China, can suddenly become knee-jerk nationalists over matters like the Senkaku Islands dispute); an occasional heavy-handedness in forcing their cultural values on you (things like having a host at a restaurant meal order all the food without consulting you at all, or insisting that you can never sip a drink without toasting or being toasted by someone really bug the crap out of me sometimes).... and, of course, the accelerated relationship timetable. (An American friend once explained it me thus: A Chinese girl isn't going to go on a second date with you unless she's decided to sleep with you. And she usually won't sleep with you unless she thinks that you're marriage material. So, by going on a second date together, she thinks you're expressing a willingness to get engaged. And she'll be wanting you to meet her parents on the third or fourth date, and making wedding plans before the end of the year. I feel he was exaggerating... but not by much.)

The combined impact of these many unfortunate factors explains, I think, why it is difficult for Westerners to form friendships with Chinese people here, and just about impossible to form any really close and lasting friendships with them.

But perhaps this isn't so strange, or so terrible. As I mentioned in the main post above, most of us have only a handful of truly close friends in our lives - probably fewer than ten in the innermost sanctum of the heart - and these tend to be people who are deeply compatible with us, in temperament, in interests, and in cultural background. I fear it is almost inconceivable that any Chinese person could attain that level of compatibility with a Westerner - not without spending several years overseas, anyway. Moreover, these very intimate friends of ours are mostly people that we met during particularly intense periods of our lives - at school, university, or at the outset of our professional career - and with whom we bonded especially closely because of some important shared experience, often a shared hardship. I think it becomes less and less likely that we will make such intimate friends after our mid-thirties - perhaps because our 'quota' is full up, or perhaps because we live life less intensely as we age. Whatever the reason, it just seems not to happen. And I was already pushing forty when I moved here.

Conspiracy theory

Once again the season of visa renewal anxiety is upon us.

It would appear that the Chinese government is even more antsy this year than last about the possibility of us troublesome foreigners making some embarrassing public show of our namby-pamby liberal-democratic political stance. Last year, the Olympics was the main focus of concern; this year, it is any one of a number of "sensitive" anniversaries.

Yet, curiously enough, there doesn't seem to be a big push to drive the foreigners out of the country right away - prior to 6/4 (as it is designated under the Chinese dating convention). No, it would appear that the celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC in the first week of October are the thing they're really worried about us spoiling. I heard recently that 'F' Visas (for "business travellers" - although that's what the majority of people are on, because it's so damned difficult to get any other kind), in addition to being difficult or impossible to get within the country (or even in Hong Kong, long the traditional 'last resort' of the visa-challenged, since the visa issuing regime there is usually much more lax than on the mainland [and technically it counts as "overseas"!!]; lately, many people, it seems, have been forced to go properly abroad, often back to their home countries, to obtain a new visa), are no longer being issued for periods extending beyond mid-September; and new visas thereafter are unlikely to be issued until at least mid-October. It seems likely that it will be very difficult to get tourist visas during that period either. I wonder if they'll clamp down on student visas too? (I have one of the gold dust "foreign expert/full-time working permit" 'Z' Visas, so I'm hoping I'll be OK, but....)

No foreigners here (or as few as possible) around the great national celebration?? It's even worse than last year's Olympic crackdown.

Is it just because we might "shame" China in front of the international media by unfurling a "Free Tibet!" banner? Probably. It seems a bit of an excessive response, though.

The 'Brains Trust' (my drinking buddies and I) have come up with a rather darker explanation. The CCP is deeply divided. There is known to be a "hard left" faction which feels that the economic reforms have gone too far, and harks back nostalgically to the authoritarian heyday of The Great Helmsman. Ah, and then there's the PLA - a sinister and unknown quantity (a journo friend told me recently he thinks there's a feeling among a lot of the top brass that they're becoming marginalised politically, even as they are becoming more powerful militarily and economically [the PLA is involved in a huge number of commercial enterprises; and most of the generals seem to be getting independently super-rich through property development projects and the like]). The world financial crisis has brought a dramatic slowdown in economic growth and mass unemployment, placing huge strain on the leadership.

Hmmm - conditions ripe for a coup, do you think? And what better time than when everyone's on holiday? And the capital is FULL of police and troops for ceremonial purposes? And yes, when, probably, there'll be a parade of tanks and APCs down Chang'an Avenue?! And just before the next big Party Congress?

Just thinking out loud, you know.

I'm reminded of a comment I found a few years ago on a thread of Michael Jackson jokes:

"I'm not saying he's guilty. I'm just saying that if I were a billionaire paedophile, I'd build a funfair in front of my house."

Haiku for the week

The grey sky teases,
Scattered drops taunt the parched earth.
Waiting for the rain.

We had a fair old downpour last Thursday, but since then - here in drought-stricken Beijing - it's been threatening to rain rather than actually raining.

Great lines not to use

Koryo Simon staged another of his occasional screenings of North Korean (or North Korea-related) films at Bar Blu the other night. I couldn't post an advance notice for the event this time because I was without Internet access at the start of the week - ggrrrr.

The first film was a compelling Dutch-made documentary about a dashing young German conductor giving masterclasses at the Pyongyang Conservatory of Music (and encountering rampant sexism in the supposedly 'model Socialist republic'). The second, a popular North Korean romantic comedy - ponderously titled Urban Girl Comes To Get Married (can't find it on IMDB!) - was a surprising gem. Not quite such a riotous romp as the "Korean Godzilla" Pulgasari that we saw a few months back, but strangely charming and very funny in parts.

A beautiful city girl visits a rural village to help with the rice harvest (still a twice-yearly ritual for almost all of the DPRK's urban populace) and develops a crush on a dashing farmer. Unfortunately the young swain is rather brusque and stand-offish with her because he is obsessed 24/7 with striving to improve farming methods and build the "workers' paradise".

Amongst my favourite thigh-slapping lines were these:

"Whenever I see you I am filled with one desire. Yes, I desire to learn your skill of making dress." (The girl is a clothes designer. Can we see a gay sub-text in this request??)

And (when she visits his house late one night; surely a promising situation...).....

"You should go home now. I have to shovel duck dung into the gas burner."

And I thought my chat was bad!!

Stubble is back in fashion??

I was running late for a lunch date with the improbably perfect woman I was romancing a month ago..... Well, she had suggested it at very short notice, a change to the plan we'd made on parting the night before; so I apologized that I needed to shower and shave before I could join her.

She joked, "I'm sure your beard cannot have grown that much overnight. And unshaviness suits a writer like you."

Sigh. Yes, I have that text message saved on my phone.

'Unshaviness' - it really ought to be a word, didn't it?

[And "a writer" like me?! Gosh, that takes some living up to!]

Paranoia

Is that what they're saying about me?

My Internet connection has been mysteriously dysfunctional since the weekend. I hardly need to tell you how hugely off-pissing that is. I do not wish to become one of this city's legion of wi-fi nomads.

This kind of service interruption happens pretty regularly (though usually just for a few hours or half a day at a time); so it is entirely possible that it is simply down to the fact that the Chinese Internet architecture is extremely rickety and that the complete lack of competition between the two main service providers leads to them both being equally crap.

However, I can't help fretting that perhaps it is a piece of targeted censorship (or harassment, intimidation, call it what you will). It's getting to be that time of year again. And I definitely suffered a lot of this in March and April last year (targeted harassment, I mean: phone taps, nuisance calls, diversion of e-mails, the whole bit). When given a choice of the conspiracy or cock-up explanations, I generally choose cock-up. But this time, I'm not so sure......

And to add further to my woes.....

On Sunday lunchtime I managed to leave my bank card in a cashpoint. I get paid in cash most of the time, and very seldom have to raid the cashpoint for readies - and so I have become somewhat incautious about the procedures you have to follow when using them here. (In the UK - at least, back in the 80s and 90s, when cashpoints were new; I can't recall what the form is now - you always used to get your money last, after the card had been returned to you. That seemed a sensible course to me, since very few people are going to forget to walk away with their money, but it is very easy to forget to walk away with your card once your primary need has been satisfied. When I first encountered money first/card last machines in Canada, I lost my card in them 5 or 6 times during the course of the year.)

This should be a blessing in disguise - since the card is very old, the lamination is flaking off it, and many cashpoints decline to recognise it as a result. I am long overdue for a replacement, but.... I have been terrified about asking for one, and putting off the evil day. This is not only because trying to achieve anything in a Chinese bank is an awful rigmarole that typically involves an hour of more of waiting and then taking 10 or 20 minutes to process your simple request (or NOT process it, as often as not), but more particularly because a year or so ago my bank stopped recognising my PIN. The PIN was still good for the cashpoints, but it suddenly didn't work on the keypads at the teller's windows, so I wasn't able to authorise even the simplest of requests any more - not even for a statement or a new passbook.

[One of my Chinese banks (I've had several in my time) refused to issue me with a passbook, so the bank card was the only evidence I had of the account, the only reminder I had of the account number. I thought that was just crazy, and closed the account down as soon as I could. Mind you, I'm not sure that the other banks place much trust in a passbook alone.]

And I have long been terrified of the extreme incompetence and obtuseness of Chinese banks in establishing customers' ID. My main bank account has managed to fuse my first and middle names together, and I suspect this aberration is responsible for the fact that numerous attempts by various employers to transfer money directly into the account have been refused by my bank (account number alone is not good enough, apparently!). Moreover, most Chinese bank staff cannot speak or write or read a word of English, and so cannot easily recognise foreign names - or find their way around supporting ID documents such as passports.

In short, your bank card is, in practice, your only means of accessing your bank account. And if you forget your PIN (or the bank changes it without telling you), then you probably won't be able to get a new PIN or a new passbook or a new bank card or to gain any access to your account ever again. The chances of you being able to establish your identity as the owner of the account based on your passport or whatever other information you wrote on your original application form are slim to none. Without your PIN, you are, to put it bluntly, completely FUCKED.

Yes, I am living with the very real fear that virtually my entire life savings are now lost to me forever - appropriated by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.

More gems from the studio

We were treated to an especially bizarre and disturbing scenario in our recording script on Monday. (We should really cherish the novelty of it, I suppose, and not dwell on its grotesqueries.)

One of our monologues recounted the story of a baby bird that strayed into a Chinese middle school classroom. The children apparently closed all the doors and windows in order to trap it (there was no mention of whether the teacher was present in the room). They then proceeded to chase the poor thing around the room, throwing their pencils, erasers, and knives at it, until it dropped to the floor, exhausted and terrified.

This appeared to be a contemporary story, not a reminiscence of the daft Mao campaign to eradicate sparrows from the country. One can scarcely conjecture what kind of warped imagination concocted this macabre scenario. The only saving grace was that the narrator - alone amongst the schoolchildren, and rather 'out of character', since he had earlier appeared to be enjoying and joining in the tormenting of the bird - eventually took pity on the creature and released it outside.

And Chinese middle school students routinely carry knives???

Yes, that piece raised a lot of uncomfortable questions.

But let us swiftly move on to something lighter. The dialogues are usually lighter than the monologues - sometimes so light that any slender thread of logic they might have contained will blow away on a puff of breeze.

"Do you like squirrels?"

"No. But I like dolphins."

That's it. No context. No resolution. Just the random juxtaposition of two of the most unlike animals you could name.

I do hope these kids weren't talking about food preferences.

An interruption to the drivelling

Where has our Froog been these past few days?

(And yes, it is a few days. At least, for me - since the last couple of posts were 'pre-programmed' on Saturday morning, just before the mammoth bar crawl that wiped out most of the rest of my weekend.)

Biding my time.

Saving the seethe.

Enjoying a preparatory gargle of pent-up bile.

Yes, once again my bloody Internet connection has been down for a few days. Once again my crappy service provider has been uncontactable, or unconcerned, or has feigned ignorance of the problem, or has protested that there is nothing it can do. Heads will roll.

The weekly bon mot

"The only difference between an artist and a lunatic is, perhaps, that the artist has the restraint or courtesy to conceal the intensity of his obsession from all except those similarly afflicted."

Osbert Sitwell (1892-1969)

Something missing

One month on, and it doesn't get any better....

hole

someone dug a hole
I don't know where it came from
or how to fill it in
but here it is
in the middle of my life
getting in the way
all the time
whenever I want to go
anywhere, do anything
I have to leap over, step around
where once there was no hole
now there's a hole

it is as broad as your smile
and as deep as your eyes
it is the shape of your laugh
I gaze into the hole, and long
to jump in

Film List - my 6 favourite cinema experiences

Rather than share memories of favourite films, this month I thought I'd review some of my favourite cinema experiences.

So (in no particular order)......

The Ritz

My hometown 'flea-pit' in Monmouth. (Or was it The Regal? Or The Roxy? God, I've forgotten!) Most of my first few hundred cinema experiences must have been there. There were a few opera boxes at the back, which my parents usually favoured - it made for a remarkably cosy and intimate feeling, rather like being able to enjoy the cinema experience in your own living room. I recall becoming indecently aroused by Racquel Welch's fur bikini in One Million Years BC, scared witless by the homicidal computer in 2001, and bored and embarrassed by my parents' sorry addiction to The Sound Of Music (which they must have taken me to see at least a half a dozen times; it's only recently that I've become able to enjoy it again).

The Penultimate Picture Palace

An arthouse flea-pit in Oxford, where I whiled away most of my undergraduate days. (After a period in hiatus, I gather it is now operating again as The Ultimate Picture Palace.) All the Oxford cinemas were great (even the major chains in the city centre); indeed, I retrospectively justified my choice of Oxford over Cambridge to myself by reference to the amount of cinema available; in the '80s, Cambridge had only about half the number of screens that Oxford did, and no decent arthouse. The other independent Oxford cinemas, The Phoenix and Not The Moulin Rouge, were also wonderful, but the PPP was my favourite of all because it was so endearingly sleazy - and so cheap.

The Prince Charles

A sleazy arthouse cinema in the heart of London, with very cheap afternoon shows. During my law school days in the mid-90s, I was a weekly - sometimes daily - visitor there; and I always make a point of going there once or twice on every trip back to the UK now.

The Castro

A huge, old school cinema - complete with a Wurlitzer organ (although, unfortunately, I have not heard it being played) - at the west end of San Francisco's main drag of Market Street, adjacent to the 'gay ghetto' of Castro Street. I went to a screening of Dr Strangelove there on my first visit to the city 15 years ago. Sadly, the place was almost deserted; but it is undoubtedly the most beautiful cinema I have ever been in.

Nameless cinema in Nadi, Fiji

While backpacking around the world in the mid-90s, I took the opportunity to go to a local cinema in Fiji a couple of times. The main features were pretty disappointing - Maverick and Blink; the supporting films I have completely forgotten. However, it was a fascinating experience, a glimpse of what film-going might have been like in America or the UK back in the early days: an uproarious communal event with lively and almost continuous audience interaction - boos, cheers, laughter, shouts of "He's behind you!", etc. (I also recall cutting my hand to ribbons one night. I'd purchased a coconut on the street outside, but in the dark I was fumbling to prise the flesh out of the shell with a Swiss Army penknife that kept snapping shut on my fingers. Ouch.)

The China Film Archive

Not an especially wonderful cinema, and I've only been there once. But it's good to know that it's so convenient for where I live - only about a 20-minute walk away. And I had a marvellous time there last month at the 'Scottish Cinema of Dreams' festival organized by Tilda Swinton and Mark Cousins. Admission was free, but it wasn't clear how many advance tickets distributed via the Internet were actually going to be used (I'd tried to get some, but the website kept crashing), so there was quite a crowd of us waiting anxiously outside, wondering if we'd get in. It was great chatting with some Chinese film enthusiasts in the queue. Some other foreign friends showed up too. And we did all get in. They were trying to recreate the atmosphere of Scotland inside: potted pine trees, pine fragrance, projections of snowy highlands on three walls, and Cousins in his kilt. I could have done without Rod Stewart's Sailing before we started the movie - but some people found it jolly. We were there to see Bill Douglas's trilogy of autobiographical short films - which are striking, but very glum viewing: not easy to sit through in a single stretch. It was also somewhat unfortunate timing, in that the early evening showing had started at around 6pm - dinner time! Luckily, there was an extended break between the second and third instalments, so we all ravenously dashed out on to the streets in a hectic search for the nearest snackfood vendors. And nobody minded that we brought beer and chuanr into the theatre with us for part three. The perfect cinema refreshments! That was the most fun (despite the oppressively dour nature of the films) I've had at the cinema in several years; and, almost certainly, the most fun I'm ever likely to have at the cinema in China.

Your 'Chinese self' is a moron

Another reason why I don't learn Chinese....

There's a funny and perceptive piece by Kaiser Kuo in his Ich Bin Ein Beijinger column in The Beijinger magazine this month (online here) in which he notes that even people who appear to have reached quite a good level of fluency in Chinese are, in reality, still very limited in the grammar and vocabulary at their disposal and the range of situations they can comfortably operate in. Hence, you can find yourself coming across as a child or an idiot when you try to engage in Mandarin conversation with a native speaker. This is something else that discourages me from making much of an effort with the language. I know I'm never going to be able to function in it with genuine fluency (but I have the bumbling basics to be able to order food or buy train tickets; and that's all I feel I need).

Now, I suspect there's a certain amount of false modesty in this article. I've met Kaiser a few times, and his Chinese seems pretty damned good to me (after all, he's been here, on and off, for something like 25 years now; and he's sung in a Chinese rock band, for heaven's sake!). Then again, perhaps he has a bit of an inferiority complex, because overseas Chinese tend to be held to higher standards: the local Chinese tend to assume initially that anyone who looks Chinese must be a native speaker, and, even when they discover that this is not the case, they seem to believe that all ethnic Chinese have an innate capacity to learn and excel in Mandarin. The people who always complain to me most about how difficult they find it to learn Mandarin (and/or to use their Mandarin effectively in day-to-day situations) are foreign-born Chinese - even though they are, in almost all cases, at least starting off with the advantage of having spoken the language a bit with their grandparents when they were kids.

Kaiser's point, I think, is that really high-level fluency - the sort of fluency we aspire to, the sort of fluency that would allow us to communicate as freely as we do in our native tongue, the sort of fluency that would allow us to fully convey our personality and our sense of humour - is, if not quite impossible to achieve, then at least extremely rare. Most people who think they're 'fluent' (and are indeed impressively so in many situations) still suffer from certain deficiencies which impede completely natural, unselfconscious communication.

A further amusing observation which Mr K calls to our attention is this: since most foreigners get to practice their Mandarin primarily with their wives/girlfriends* or with taxi drivers, their 'Chinese persona' tends to be coloured by these models - to veer wildly between Carrie Bradshaw and Jake La Motta.

* Although I feel that the gender imbalance in the expat population has narrowed in the last few years, there are probably still considerably more men than women. And, for a variety of reasons, foreign guys do - mostly - seem to dig Chinese chicks.... whereas Chinese men are less universally admired.

George WHO?

This morning in the recording studio we were treated to yet another example of Chinese ineptitude in dealing with English names, this time resulting from the inability to recognise well-known names (usually because of a complete ignorance of how they are spelt or pronounced in English) when transcribing foreign radio or television programmes.

Today, you see, we had to read a dialogue about George Oki. You know, the famous American woman painter who drew much inspiration from the landscapes of the New Mexico desert. That George Oki.

Haiku for the week

Illness fills the mind,
Takes possession of one's life.
Illness, dread, despair.

I have been miserably ill for the past two weeks or so, but, touch wood, today seems to have marked rather a breakthrough. I still have a painfully raspy throat and a tickly cough, but I'm no longer running a fever. The glands in my neck are still the size of walnuts, but I no longer feel as if my entire throat is puffed up like a bullfrog's. Speaking is still a little uncomfortable, but swallowing no longer is; and I don't seem to be in imminent danger of losing my voice any more. Progress indeed!

I've had several episodes like this in recent years, but I usually manage to see them off with a self-prescribed course of antiobiotics. It's provoked by the dust in the air we so often suffer in Beijing, but I think it is some form of infection rather than an allergy. It is pretty dramatic - I was not exaggerating with that bullfrog analogy. And, of course, I worry that there may be some underlying problem rendering me susceptible to these throat infections (or that such serious, recurring ill health may cause me some kind of permanent damage), especially when one persists for so long and, on this occasion, proves impervious to the usual treatments.

I have been so worried this week that I was on the brink of consulting a doctor. And I absolutely hate having to consult a doctor; I haven't done so for years. To be frank, I was becoming concerned that maybe there was something wrong with my lymph nodes. You know, something.

It didn't help my mood - or my hypochondria - that I learned this week that a Beijing friend had recently died of cancer, barely a year after he was first diagnosed. That makes 5 people I know amongst the expat community here who've had cancer, 3 of whom have died - and they've all been in their 30s or 40s. Maybe that isn't statistically significant (although I don't think I know anyone my age back home who's had cancer problems), but it's a disturbing and depressing coincidence. The environment in Beijing is pretty damn toxic and we are, I'm sure, all shortening our lives by being here. I just hope we're not shortening them by that much.

Cartoon

Two butterflies are resting beside each other on a leaf.

One suddenly stirs, shudders, flexes its wings agitatedly, and cries out, "Oh my god, what a terrible nightmare!"

His concerned companion speaks soothingly to him. "Oh, honey, not the Zhuangzi dream again?"

[Ah, if only I could draw.....]

Progress?

Is it just me, or has there been in the China Daily recently just a little more "openness", a little more willingness to address difficult issues and voice opinions critical of the status quo? We probably shouldn't get too excited about it. The range of topics they're allowed to be this adventurous on is no doubt still narrowly prescribed by higher authorities, and the criticisms remain very oblique, muted.

A couple of days ago, for example, there was an editorial on the case of Wu Baoquan, a man from Ordos in Inner Mongolia, who has been jailed for posting online comments critical of the way in which the local government there had carried out forced land acquisitions (a common source of complaint in China today). The writer delicately notes that the apparent use of the police as "a tool of local government to tackle unfavourable opinion" (again, a very common source of complaint in China) is "a role that might go against the Constitution and relevant legal codes". Might?? It's amazing how no-one in this country has a clue how to handle modal verbs until it's necessary to make your English as wishy-washy as possible when expressing some criticism.

The piece also notes that, while you may not be able to trust your police or your government in China, it's all right, because the Internet these days is providing a useful avenue for righting such wrongs. This notion was prompted by the fact that the victim in a very similar recent case in Henan has been released from prison early and given an official apology, after there was an online outcry about what had happened to him. However, this praise of the power of the Internet seems somewhat grimly ironic, given that both these men, and others too, were jailed for precisely that - trying to use the Internet to publicize a grievance. There's no sign yet of a remission of sentence for Mr Wu. (We're told that he should be happy that he's been given leave to appeal again; but he might not be quite so stoked about that, because the first time he appealed, the judge doubled his sentence from one year to two because he had showed "a lack of contrition" by continuing to pursue his complaint against the local government.)

The real money quote, though, is this:

Bending laws by judicial organs such as public security departments should be the last thing to happen in a country with a sound rule of law.

Gosh! Are they implying - ever so gently and indirectly - that China doesn't have a sound rule of law? I think perhaps they are.

Olympic leftovers (4): "Ma Lin says 'hello'!"

My best friend here in Beijing, a rather sporty and roguishly charming young Irishman, managed to break both his wrists on the eve of his birthday last year. (Don't practise capoeira when drunk is the lesson we learn from this.)

Although this was a moderately amusing story, he was naturally rather shamefaced about telling it; and his friends all soon grew bored of hearing it. So, for a while, we developed a little competition of suggesting more exotic explanations for his incapacity. Our favourite (since this was just after the Olympics last year) was that he had been Ireland's surprise hope of a gold medal in the men's table tennis, but that the Chinese team - desperate to protect its domination of the competition - had sent the heavies round to sort him out. "Ma Lin says hello."

[Yes, I'm recycling again. I originally recounted this anecdote in a comment over on Tony's blog; but it still amuses me.]

Who stopped the rain?

Apparently, it rained pretty heavily almost everywhere in China over the weekend. Everywhere.... except in Beijing, where we had only a couple of light showers overnight. Beijing is still pretty damned parched. At least the laying of the dust across much of north China has restored our blue skies (the air in Beijing is still fairly poisonous, especially anywhere near the huge construction sites around Sanlitun; but at least it's transparent again, which it wasn't for much of the preceding fortnight).

Quite a few times recently, it's looked like it might rain here in the capital, it's felt like rain.... but it hasn't rained. This is quite remarkable, since ordinarily any and every cloud that approaches the city is promptly shot full of silver iodide by artillery batteries stationed to the south and west - and, sure enough, rain comes. A sour-tasting, chemical-rich rain that tints the sky green.

But I don't think we've seen any of that since the Olympics last year.

There are two (non-exclusive) 'conspiracy theories' to explain this curious circumstance. Or three, if you believe in karma or divine retribution or....

1) OK, so, the Hand-of-God, reap-what-you-sow, don't-mess-with-Dame-Nature explanation is simply that the powers-that-be here in Beijing are being punished for all the meddling they did with the weather last year to try and ensure a reasonably well-watered and non-polluted Olympics. There doesn't have to be any mechanism; it's simply right and just that we are now suffering month after month of rain-free, cloud-free drought and inexorably turning into a desert.

But me, I like to try and find a mechanism always.

2) The drought currently afflicting north central China is at least partly caused by the massive re-routing of water supplies to the capital last summer. Beijing demanded so much water from the provinces to the west that their water-tables were dangerously depleted, and still haven't recovered. Beijing's not getting any rain because there's now very little groundwater to evaporate from the areas immediately upwind.

3) Even when clouds do appear over the capital, we don't seem to be trying the silver iodide trick any more. Did we use up all our stocks last year? No, I think it's more possible, more likely that we're having to observe some kind of quota system. I noted last year that Beijing's rampant cloud-seeding must effectively be robbing areas further east - notably the sprawling municipality of Tianjin - of rainfall, and that this probably couldn't continue completely unregulated. I suspect that Beijing used up all of its cloud-seeding allowance and then some last summer, and is now being forced to refrain from the practice for a while.

Just idle speculation, of course. But I think these ideas merit some investigation.

Yet another not-the Daily Llama

Aw, cute.

But not a llama. No, this little fella is another vicuňa. The last one was too sketchy for some people....

Oddly familiar

Here's another "favourite" script from my recording work, one that exemplifies a different variety of the Chinese ineptitude (or the ineptitude of China's educational publishing houses, at any rate) in dealing with English names.

In one well-worn scenario (I must have recorded this many dozens of times now, with only the smallest of variations), a cub reporter is approaching a small-town college professor for an interview. Something like this....

"Excuse me, Professor Brown. Could you spare me a few minutes of your time to answer some questions? My name's Helen Keller."

"Helen Keller? That name sounds familiar."

[I can't help thinking that this sounds like a sarcastic interpolation from myself or one of my fellow voice-workers, transcribed - unwittingly? - into later versions of the dialogue.]

"Yes. I write a column on the environment for the local paper."

"Ah, of course. Helen Keller! Nice to meet you."

[I am not making this up.]

A bon mot double-header

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he once vowed to make it."

J.M. Barrie (1860-1937)

"We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us."

E.M. Forster (1878-1970)

China and me (memories of my first encounter)

I have just passed the 15th anniversary of my first visit to China. I can't now recall the exact date. I flew into Hong Kong some time in the second half of March, but Qing Ming - the big annual grave-sweeping festival - caught me out by falling fairly early that year: all travel to the mainland was booked solid, and I found myself trapped in Hong Kong for 10 or 12 days, waiting to sort out a flight to Wuhan. When I did finally arrange that ticket, it was for a ridiculously early flight out of Shenzhen (now, of course, a bustling metropolis, but at that time still largely under construction; no kidding - my taxi ride to the airport from the small downtown area was 40 or 50 minutes of passing nothing but building sites), so I had to take the train over the border the day before and find a cheap hotel to spend the night. That episode is best glossed over: Shenzhen was a nightmare. I date the beginning of my experience of China proper from my touching down at Hankou airport (the runway only a rough concrete strip surrounded by grass; the terminal building a simple hangar; baggage claim a hurly-burly free-for-all as we snatched our possessions directly off the back of the tractor). It's a pity I don't remember exactly when that was; the beginning of April, I guess.

It was an unimaginably different world here back then. About 18 months ago, I revisited Hankou for the first time since '94 and barely recognised the place: an entirely new city has sprung up there. The new airport is gleaming and modern, no longer just a shack in a field. There are no more steam trains (passenger trains had already moved over to diesel, but steam was still being used for some freight until about 10 years ago, I think); and train tracks no longer wind through ramshackle neighbourhoods, taking you by surprise as they emerge from between houses and run straight down the middle of the street for a while. There no longer seems to be any of the drab, grey one- and two-storey housing that used to be everywhere there; it's all apartment blocks now.

It was still "a country of bicycles" back then. There were hardly any private cars, other than for a few party bigwigs; and only a handful of taxis, compared to today. The main passenger service was provided by motorised rickshaws - small motortrikes with crudely improvised bench seats and canopies (made of the then ubiquitous red, white and blue striped plastic sheeting which used to adorn every shop-front and building site; these days, it only seems to be used for laundry bags) fastened above the rear wheels. Very unstable. I had one particularly hairy experience as our driver dodged crazily through back alleys littered with building materials, seeking out the most improbable shortcuts as he made a heroic but rather too careless-of-danger attempt to get us to the Wuchang Stadium in time for a football match; at one point he clipped a pile of sand with one of his rear wheels and we got a good 25° or 30°of tilt on for what seemed like several seconds. I'm sure the only reason we didn't flip over on to our side was that I was 1.5 times as tall and twice as heavy as the Chinese friend who was sharing the seat with me, and so was able to provide saving counterbalance. Yes, sometimes your beergut may save your life - really.

There were some guys offering a passenger service on small two-wheeled motorcycles too, for one person, riding pillion; I didn't have that much of a deathwish. These machines were something of a novelty back then, and most people didn't seem to have much idea how to ride them. Accidents were commonplace. And both the bikes and the one-size-fits-all 'passenger helmet' offered were way too small for me.

So, the adoption of new forms of transport had begun, but it hadn't got very far by that point. Apart from the buses, there were some mini-vans and the occasional Liberty truck - but, basically, hardly any motorised traffic at all. Just thousands and thousands of bicycles, human rivers of them, 8 or 10 abreast on each side of the road. Even Beijing, I heard (though I didn't get the chance to visit the capital on that trip), was much the same in those days - eerily quiet compared to the constant rumble of traffic we endure today.

The commercial revolution hadn't yet really taken off. There were no major brands or national chains. A lot of restaurants and shops still bore old-style Communist designations like No. 23 Workers' Canteen (a particularly good spot for re gan mian) and No. 1 Department Store. Almost every house was attempting to run some sort of business out of its front room, but often with no sort of sign out front; and often those businesses would wither and disappear within weeks (in the neighbourhood where I was staying, I saw a number of these enterprises abruptly abandoned in favour of trying something else, just in the couple of months or so I was there). Our favourite eating spot in the 'hood was a family home that we knew simply as "The Fat Lady's", our affectionate nickname for the cheery and well-fed woman who owned it and did most of the cooking (I think she was actually called Mrs Wu). A little further down the street, another house opened itself up as a baijiu store; the guy had a selection of 8 or 10 huge 'Ali Baba' earthenware jars in a tiny, unlit room opening on to the street. You'd bring along your own container - usually a small plastic jerrycan - and he'd painstakingly fill it up for you with a ladle. I think the price was only about 10 kuai for 2 or 3 litres, even of "the good stuff". And the boss was quite happy to give us free tastings (perhaps only because we were foreigners, and foreigners were still a glamorous rarity in those days), even though we'd abuse this facility at least a couple of times a week: only a couple of sips each time from a porcelain thimble-cup, but still quite enough to get you lightly oiled, when you're sampling 5 or 6 liquors in quick succession, and on an empty stomach.

Exposure to cultural influences from outside China was still very limited. At the gate of the university where I was staying, there was a music shop (at that time, only cassette tapes were available; but within a year or so, I think, there would be a big influx of cheap CDs - quality-control rejects or deleted stock that had been 'clipped' to try to render them unusable - that would make a lot of Western popular music available here for the first time). The music they would blare out of their speakers every day seemed to progress chronologically, as if they were attempting to provide a potted history of Western music to passers-by (or perhaps this was simply the order in which the owners themselves happened to be discovering it?): at first it was all Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry (no Elvis, I don't think); but after a few weeks, they moved on to The Beatles and The Beach Boys, and a little later again to The Rolling Stones and The Who; towards the end of my time there, glam rock started to make an appearance - and I found myself regretting that I couldn't stay just a bit longer, to see if they would embrace punk next.

In theory, foreign currency was not convertible. You were expected to buy this weird intermediary currency - the FEC (Foreign Exchange Certificate) - which could only be spent in a handful of designated hotels and restaurants and at the special 'Friendship Stores'. This system was in the process of being phased out, as China lobbied for acceptance into the WTO, but was still nominally in place during that first visit of mine. In practice, of course, almost everyone was happy to get their hands on your pounds or dollars, and 'illegal' street-corner moneychanging was a daily event. (Hmm, perhaps that's one thing that hasn't changed so much: bank commissions are so high, so few branches actually stock much if any foreign currency, and there are so many piddling bureaucratic restrictions on how much money you can change, that just about every foreigner I know - including several who run 'legitimate' businesses here - still routinely uses backstreet moneychangers, because there's no real alternative.)

You didn't encounter much English back then. There was one stock phrase, "Hello! How are you?" (invariably enunciated in such improbably plummy tones that I always expected someone to follow up with "More tea, vicar?" or "Anyone for tennis?" ; I couldn't help but think that some listening practice tape they'd all been exposed to must have been culled from the sitcoms of Penelope Keith) which almost everyone seemed to know, and which would follow you down the street everywhere you went. Apart from this, just about no-one you'd meet on the street spoke a word of it. (However, I was touring around a lot, visiting universities and teacher training colleges, so I'd meet a lot of students, academics, and government officials who did speak some English.) There was no English or pinyin on road signs or food packaging, and only a very little on shop signs or advertisements - very different from today! The sense of being surrounded everywhere by Chinese writing - screaming incomprehensibly at you - was rather oppressive. But it did create an incentive, an imperative to learn the Chinese language that is lacking today; then, it was necessary for survival; today it's purely elective. Within just a few weeks, I developed a pretty fair listening ability, could speak a few dozen words quite effectively, and could even read quite a few of the most important characters (distinguishing 男, male, and 女, female, was the first essential, since toilets were never labelled in any other way back then). Most Chinese cities today are a bilingual environment, in both speech and writing; in these circumstances, it is much harder to learn Chinese, and much easier to get by without it - my Chinese has withered with each year I've spent in Beijing.

The country was on a cusp back then - poised between the possibility of breathtaking transformation or stagnation and collapse. Since the events of '89, China had suffered international isolation and the consequent stalling of its economic reform programme; and although Deng Xiaoping had tried to get things moving forward again with his famous 'Southern Tour' the year before, it was unclear whether his initiatives were yet having any effect - at least, outside of Shenzhen and the Pearl River delta. A German journalist I was hanging out with a lot was extremely alarmed about the country's prospects. Local government employees in Wuhan, he told me, were owed some months of back pay, and were threatening strike action. Many of the local utilities had broken down: refuse collections had been suspended some time ago, and people were dropping their rubbish down manholes. (Under-street explosions from accumulating methane were becoming commonplace; I witnessed one at extremely close quarters. Interestingly, many of the Chinese passengers who scattered from the bus we were on at the time seemed at first to think that we were under attack from the police or the army - such were the anxieties of those times.) Power cuts of an hour or two were an almost daily event; most of the larger shops and restaurants left candles out on counters and tables, ready to be lit whenever required. There was no street-lighting, other than on a handful of main thoroughfares; and, in the dark, missing manhole covers were a major hazard - I nearly stumbled into oblivion two or three times. Above all, the country was conspicuously dirt poor: even the major cities still felt like 'the Third World'. In short, China early in 1994 appeared to be coming apart at the seams. But it didn't. Somehow, that crisis was weathered, the reforms began to take hold, and the national economy would sustain double-digit growth for a dozen or so years.

I am glad to have seen the country at that crucial stage in its development; rather sorry not to have seen it also a decade or so earlier, when the legacy of the Mao years had scarcely been shrugged off; and yes, I confess, I am perversely disappointed that the China experience today is not so intense, so raw, so challenging. I was surprised to find how massively Beijing had changed by the beginning of the Noughties, even before the huge drive to rebuild the city ahead of the Olympics: the capital, and almost all of the country's cities and larger towns, now feel very modern, very 'Westernized' (KFC and Starbucks spread like Giant Hogweed). China is still very different from Europe or North America; but it's no longer so utterly alien as it was 10 or 15 years ago; and I do kind of miss that.

I had the time of my life on that first trip - travelling, mostly alone, on buses, boats and trains, all around the central provinces of Hubei, Hunan, and Szechuan - and I completely fell in love with this strange and crazy country. As soon as I got back to England at the end of the year, I began to look for ways to come back here. My German journalist friend had dreams of setting up an international school in Wuhan, but they never came to fruition; some contacts I'd made in universities and in the Ministry of Education had promised to help me find a job, but those promises proved empty; in desperation, I tried applying to VSO (the British equivalent of the Peace Corps, which was at that time providing most of the few hundreds of foreign English teachers in the country; very different from the situation today, where there are tens of thousands of them, mostly recruited directly by private schools and colleges), but even they turned me down (I think they took my eagerness to return to China as a sign of mental instability!).

So.... I got sidetracked doing other things for 7 years, and when I finally came back here, the China I knew had all but disappeared. But it's still wonderful, in constantly new, constantly changing ways: it's mad and huge and friendly and frustrating and baffling and endlessly vibrant. It's hard for me now to imagine anywhere else I'd rather live.

More snapshots from the countryside

I am much given to still life and abstraction....