A reader asked me to share a bit about my experience living in China, so I thought I ought to oblige both him and my nostalgia. I suppose China is on my mind lately, because an old friend of mine – a woman from Kunming – recently got in touch. She’s a professor of Chinese calligraphy in France now. Not sure how she pulled that off, but the girl sure did have some spunk. I have nothing but fond memories of her, and am happy to see that she has found a place for herself in France.
I lived in Peking, now known as Beijing, from 1997-1999, when I could barely call myself a man. Life in Seattle had become something of a dead end for me, or so it seemed. I hated school, and found myself descending into the underworld of youth subculture, which involved all the usual hedonistic pursuits of the 90s. I decided that I had to get out, and having studied a couple years of Mandarin and made friends with some visiting Chinese students, decided that Beijing was the place to go.
I started by renewing my passport, obtaining a three-month tourist visa and purchasing a round trip ticket with an open return date. I had no idea how long I’d last in China, but I knew when I would go, so at least there was some kind of a plan. Fortunately, my friend suggested that I stay in his parents’ house for a couple of months, so I knew I at least had a temporary place to stay.
When I arrived in Beijing the city was in the midst of a transformation. Buildings were rising like mushrooms after the autumn rains, and armies of construction workers marched to their jobs every morning. It was early September, so the weather was quite pleasant, but the haze of coal smoke and the dust from the incessant building gave the streets an otherworldly ambience, which I would take in as though in a dream on my first walks around the neighborhood.
My friend’s parents lived in a danwei, which is a neighborhood built around a work unit. This was a relic of the Communist system of organization, and because each danwei was organized to provide for the needs of its workers and families, it had something of the feel of a town within a city. Everybody knew about the newly arrived young foreigner, and watched me with curiosity, and probably some suspicion as well. It took a while to grow accustomed to the fact that everyone around me was Chinese. For a while, it seemed a bit surreal to be surrounded by a sea of bronze-colored faces, but eventually it simply became the norm.
After staying with my friend’s family for some six weeks I found a job as a teacher, and then they helped me find an apartment nearby in a neighborhood close to Sanhuanlu (Third Ring Road), which was almost suburban at the time, but due to development is now well within the urban confines of Beijing. The people running the school I was to work at advised me that I needed to go to Hong Kong to get another visa, so I made arrangements to do so. I decided to fly to Hong Kong and then take the train back to Beijing after obtaining my visa. All in all, Hong Kong was an interesting place. I’ll never forget landing in the old airport, where the plane descends over the water and then suddenly huge buildings rise all around and you touch down right in the middle of the city. I went in November of ‘97, so it was still suffering from the effects of the economic crisis. The shopkeepers in Kowloon seemed rather dejected, and I stayed in a cramped hotel room, sharing a bathroom with several other people. I have never in my life seen people packed together tighter than in Hong Kong. The city is like a honeycomb of humanity.
After procuring my visa, I took the train across the border to Shenzhen, where I bought a ticket to Beijing. I opted for the “luxury” soft bed, which was essentially a mattress on a board (at least it was clean), and then stayed overnight in Shenzhen pending departure. While in the hotel in Shenzhen, I was harassed by whores, who would call up on the hotel phone and ask if I wanted a girl. One of them even came to my room, and was so pushy that I ended up giving her money to go away. The beggars in the streets were even worse. Gangs of street urchins with babies in their arms mobbed me outside the train station so closely that I had to wrap my jacket around me as tight as possible to keep them out of my pockets. There were legless beggars strategically placed on bridges and such, lying on their bellies and pathetically extending their tin cups. After a while I began to realize something awful: the beggars and kids with babies were part of an organized beggar gang. They all looked the same — each beggar had both legs cut off at the knee and the kids all had obviously drugged babies in their arms. It brought the beggar gangs of pre-industrial London to mind. Shenzhen was truly a wretched place at the time.
With great relief I boarded the train for Beijing in the morning, finding myself in a coach with a middle aged couple. They turned out to be very nice, pleasant people, and my Chinese was just starting to click at that time, so I appreciated the conversation and company. Unlike your typical American couple, the Chinese husband and wife were perfectly relaxed with each other and happy together. The wife was well past her prime, but she had such an accommodating, easygoing attitude toward her husband that he struck me as a lucky man. She called him her “old man,” and would stretch out languorously on the berth next to him, while he would contentedly sip tea. They were what one would call “laobaixing” in China — that is, the Chinese version of what Americans call the middle class. They were neither relatively wealthy nor poor for city folk (they were headed home to Beijing), and they didn’t seem at all stressed by their station in life. Theirs was a good life from the looks of it, and they complemented each other perfectly.
This was one of the first examples I saw of the natural affection Chinese men and women had for each other, and it was comforting to the child that still dwelt within me, young as I was at the time. I was to see more over time, but for me it always remained elusive; a sort of wistful ideal that was to haunt me the entire time I dwelt in China.
I was supposedly on the fast train to Beijing, but in fact it was pretty slow. Not that I minded all that much — the countryside that rolled by the window was fascinating. As we rolled north through the rice paddies of southern China, I saw ancestral tablets, peasants plowing fields with water buffalo, and people wearing the traditional garb of the region. Where we crossed the Yangtze it was so vast that it hardly seemed a river. It was more like a great lake spanned by an endless bridge.
China is effectively divided into north and south, and the great Yangtze River is the line. The change is immediately noticeable even from a train. After crossing the river the fields of bok choy became fields of bai cai, the water buffalo were replaced with oxen, and the lush rice paddies of the south gave way to dusty, dry farms of the north. Even the hats the peasants wore changed shape — from conical to funnel-shaped. Although it took about three days to get from Shenzhen to Beijing, I was glad to have seen so much of China from the ground. Flying over the country just isn’t the same; one doesn’t get a feel for the land from 30,000 feet.
Soon I was back in Beijing, armed with a new visa, a job and an apartment. I was ready to strike out on my own as an expat, and filled with a nervous kind of excitement. I knew at that point that I wasn’t going to come back home to Seattle for a while, and looked forward to facing the unknown.
–To be continued…
