First person
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Son of a turtle!
When Susan Barker emigrated to Beijing, she thought she had learned
enough Chinese to get by. A string of inconvenient and embarrassing
misunderstandings soon put her in her place ...
Monday May 12, 2008
http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/family/story/0,,2279414,00.html
The Guardian
Last year, I decided to emigrate to Beijing. I couldn't afford to live
in London on what I earned as a novelist any more, and living in China
has been a lifelong ambition of mine. So I bought a one-way plane
ticket, a travel guide and a suitcase, and got myself a 90-day tourist
visa. When that ran out, I planned to fly to Hong Kong and get it
renewed, or buy a six-month business visa from a visa agent in
Beijing. I wasn't entirely certain whether this was legal, but the
agents didn't seem to care. I didn't expect getting permission to stay
to be a problem back then, as I'd heard visas were easy to obtain.
My family were bemused. My dad joked about me joining the Red Guards
and being sent to a re-education camp. I promised not to try any
herbal medicines or practise Falun Gong. My mum is Chinese Malaysian -
her father emigrated from China to Malaysia in the 40s and she moved
to Britain in 1969.
She didn't understand why I wanted to live in China. My family in
Malaysia go on organised tours to the motherland, with coach trips to
temples and cultural relics. Why didn't I want to do the same? Why
follow the chain of immigration backwards to a developing country?
Still, a month later I arrived at Beijing Capital Air****t, jetlagged
and euphoric, my possessions scaled down to the 22kg airline luggage
allowance. I moved into a friend's vacant apartment in a run-down
building by the third ring road. The deposit and six months' rent in
advance was less than one month's rent in London, which meant I could
get by on my savings for a year before having to get a job.
In the first weeks I explored the city by bus, choosing routes at
random. Beijing is a city in flux and an exhilarating place to be. I
love the sci-fi landscape of the Central Business District, the ****ny
metallic skyscrapers impaling the clouds. On the ring-road overpass by
my flat you can lean over the exhaust-blackened railings and see 12
lanes of traffic speeding beneath you. Half of Beijing is a
construction site: workmen scaling buildings caged in scaffolding, the
swing of wrecking balls and rumble of pneumatic drills a kind of
pre-Olympics anthem. The air quality is terrible here - there are days
when visibility is so poor buildings 50 metres away are like faded
apparitions. But I soon became used to the dust irritating my eyes, to
seeing the sun haloed with smog and dimmed so pale you can stare
directly at it without damaging your retinas.
Within days I realised the Chinese I had learned in Britain wasn't
Chinese at all, because I neglected to learn tones, which are integral
to Chinese speech. When I thought I was asking a passer-by for
directions to the internet cafe, I was actually calling him a "son of
a turtle". When I said, "I've caught a cold," others heard, "I have
*** with cats."
At parties where hardly anyone spoke English, I'd smile a lot as the
other guests had animated conversations around me. Because I was
illiterate as well as mute, I'd choose dishes in restaurants by
pointing at the photos in the menu. When there were no photos, I'd
point to dishes at random and end up with a plate of stir-fried pig's
intestines.
During trips to the local supermarket I'd wander the aisle, lassoing
shop assistants with my helplessness. I became a mime artist to
describe what I was looking for, using an invisible knife to spread
invisible butter on invisible bread. I shopped by a process of trial
and error, discovering in my kitchen that what I thought was sunflower
oil was actually vinegar, and what I mistook for flour was powdered
rice. Once I cracked an egg on the edge of a frying pan and discovered
it was boiled.
Simple things like answering a knock at the door could be perplexing.
Sometimes I'd open the door to people with clipboards, who'd deliver
sales pitches at breakneck speed, before noticing my mute
incomprehension, apologising and backing away. Once it was the man who
lives in the flat directly beneath me shouting and jabbing his finger
at my chest. What was he trying to tell me? That my pipes were
leaking? That my ceiling was collapsing?
Another time it was a stranger who smiled and held up a laminated card
on a cord around his neck. He was wearing a tie and looked official,
so I let him in. He took two see-through plastic socks out of his
pocket and pulled them over his shoes. "So as not to dirty my floor?"
I wondered. "So as not to splatter his nice leather shoes with my
blood as he bludgeons my skull with a lead pipe?" He went to the
kitchen and read the water meter. When he left I shut the door behind
him, and felt very foolish as my heart beat decelerated.
After a summer in Beijing I enrolled on an intensive language course:
four hours a day, five days a week in a classroom, then several hours
after school practising writing Chinese characters in an A4 notepad.
After two months of language school, I became semi-literate.
I discovered what the businesses once shrouded in mystery actually
were. That the shady-looking establishments at the end of my road were
not a gambling den and the local gangsters' HQ, but a key-cutters and
travel agents. How disappointingly ordinary!
There are 16 million people living in Beijing, but the expat community
is very small. I keep bumping into the same foreigners at bookshops,
bars and restaurants. When expats get together we tend to make vast
generalisations about China and complain. This is understandable, as
many western cultural values are turned on their head here.
Generalising is a way of making sense of things, and people have a lot
of frustrations to vent. But rather than creating a sup****t network, I
find the negativity brings me down.
So the people that I am closest to here are Chinese. With my new
limited language ability I have befriended my neighbour, a woman in
her 60s. She lives with her 80-year-old mother and a fierce little dog
called Wei Wei, who growls and struts about shaking a maimed teddy
bear in her jaws. I drink tea in their living room on Sunday evenings,
as Peking opera singers warble on the TV in the background. When I
told my neighbour that I am half Chinese, that my mother is Chinese
Malaysian, she shook her head and told me, firmly but kindly, that my
mother is not Chinese. She wasn't born in China, so how can she be?
My neighbour, who was born in Shandong province, worked in a canning
factory during the cultural revolution. She graduated from university
at 30 and worked for an accountancy firm. She has a 27-year-old
daughter who lives with her biker husband and has many multi-coloured
tattoos. When I asked her if she is bitter that her only education
between the ages of 16 and 26 was studying the catechisms of Chairman
Mao, she smiled and said: "Why are you foreigners so obsessed with the
cultural revolution? Look at Beijing now - what a city it has become!
And the Olympics are coming this year! Why aren't you married?
Twenty-nine is a bit old to be single, isn't it?"
She insisted that I teach her some English swearwords. Now she and her
mother know a wide range of profanities. Her 80-year-old mother
shrieks, "Mother****ing son of a *****!" every time the dog rears up
on its hind legs and pokes its nose in the dustbin, and I am very
proud of her pronunciation.
Last month I found out that the Chinese government has changed its
visa regulations: it wants to remove superfluous foreigners from
Beijing before the Olympics, probably because it's worried about Free
Tibet protests. All business visas will expire on July 1, regardless
of when they were issued, and tourist visas are now limited to 30 days
- which means I may have to make a visa run to Hong Kong once a month.
At the moment I am very confused about whether I can stay here for the
Olympics or will have to leave and come back afterwards when the visa
regulations are back to normal. Emigrating here has not been as easy
as I thought it would be.
That I may have to leave soon is a real disappointment, because after
nearly a year here, Beijing is not nearly as bewildering as it used to
be. I go to the supermarket and return home with exactly what I need.
I hear the weather re****t and know it is going to rain.
I answer the phone and know the recorded message is telling me to pay
the phone bill.
I know the names of my neighbours, their only children and
government-regulation 35cm-high one-dog-policy dogs. I've become used
to 24-hour construction sites, to skyscrapers mushrooming overnight,
to staring up at the sky and not knowing where the pollution ends and
the clouds begin. The tasks that used to be complicated, such as
calling a repair man, ordering food, haggling in the market, I now do
unthinkingly. The transition happened gradually, without me even
noticing. But now I have, and though I still have a long way to go,
things are finally going OK.
ยท Susan Barker's new novel, The Orientalist and the Ghost, is
published by Doubleday.
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