Don't cry, look at the foreigner.

Car Crash

2012-09-09T06:08:00.003-07:00

I saw a crash today at the bus stop. The bus had gone round the corner and stopped so it could reverse out of the junction and head the other way, when another car shot around the corner and smashed into the back of it.

I'd heard that in China, rather than use insurance, drivers get out and argue until someone agrees to pay the other one. Apparently it's usually the richer guy that pays because of the loss of face that arguing involves. Anyway, I wanted to see the process and see if this was true, so I just watched. There wasn't really that much of an argument. The guy from the car went over and said something to the bus driver, with a big grin on his face. He was a lot more relaxed than I would have expected from a guy who had just destroyed the front of his car. He then went back and started looking for a phone number while the bus driver got on the phone to someone else. A few minutes later, both guys had been on the phone and hung up, a third guy had come to take a look. Then, the guy from the car opened his boot, took out a few hundred RMB and gave it to the bus driver, who put it in his pocket and got into his bus to continue his route. The other guy got in his car and drove off.

American football, Chinese style

2012-09-09T06:06:00.003-07:00

American football, Chinese style

“Don't you interested?” Asked Tori, the logistics girl for the foreign teaching staff. She wanted to know if I wanted to come along to an American Football match the following day. I agreed, excited as I had never seen one live.

Rumours had spread that it was Rugby, rather than American football, which made it less special but, given I have just been asked to start up a Rugby club for the school, I thought it might be useful to remind myself how to play.

We got a car to the stadium and Tori gave me the ticket. American football after all. It was obviously American football because of the picture of the American football players, in full gear, on the tickets. We walked into the stadium. A big banner welcomed us, again with an American footballer pictured. On the pitch, a game of rugby. Maybe the Chinese don't know the difference – I guess neither sport is big here.

The match was interesting. The Chinese military versus the Hong Kong Pandas. No surprise who was winning. The military were thrashing their opponents. Every player was twice the size of their HK counterparts and it was clearly a one sided match. Still, I couldn't help but think that nobody on the pitch ACTUALLY knew the rules. Including the referee. It seemed almost every decision made was made in favour of the military regardless of what had actually happened. I guess the audience didn't know any better, so it didn't matter – but it did make me wonder if there was any way HK would have been allowed to beat the Chinese military on Chinese soil.

On another note, the cheerleaders at half time were great. I don't know which team they represented, but it was nice to have that Americanism brought into it, given the match itself was totally different from what I was expecting.

Outside, we waited for our car to take us home. We were in Zhencheng, a city that was very much like Chongqing in the sense foreigners were a novelty. Within a few minutes, a group of girls had come over to ask for pictures. When they were done, another group came and did the same thing. A third group came immediately afterwards. I've had this before, but never so many in such a short space of time. I'd known for a while that the Chinese often take photos with foreigners because it helps them to 'gain face' by telling people about their foreign friends, but Tori explained that sometimes high school kids and university students do it to show their parents 'evidence' that they can speak English and have been doing well in school.

Education - China

2012-09-09T06:02:00.002-07:00

A little girl had fainted. She was put onto a middle aged man's back and taken away. Presumably to see the nurse. Next to me was a little girl who was throwing up. Behind me, a little boy was sitting down out of the heat to recover. This was the school 'opening ceremony', a kind of assembly for the first day of term. The Children were standing, one arm raised, in strict lines in the blistering heat while the school flag was raised and the school band played some kind of an anthem. I looked to where the little boy had been sitting. There were two boys now. The headmaster spoke. Children repeated words he wanted repeated and clapped when he wanted them to clap. Mid way through the speech, which lasted just a few minutes, the number of children recovering was now four. A few minutes later it had doubled again. By the end of the assembly, nine children were sitting in the recovery zone with the original boy and countless more had been taken off to the nurse. We walked back to the classroom. All around me, children were crouching down with stomach aches, or vomiting, or looking just generally unwell. The heat had got to them badly. It seemed incredibly harsh, incredibly Chinese.

The first few days had certainly been very different from what I was used to. Nobody had told me anything about the class I would be teaching, the subjects, the curriculum. I had not been introduced to any teachers so I had taken it upon myself to message them using the contact details I had been given for emergencies and arrange drinks. We had a meeting the next day – the day before students come in to register for the term – telling us almost nothing about what we would be doing, just that some of the classrooms were not ready, including mine. Building work had begun next to the international section and our classrooms had been deemed unsafe. I asked if the new classrooms would be ready in time. The boss shrugged...thought...and said “I guess so”. They were ready, just. We spent the whole day cutting and pasting stickers to put around the walls.

I was asked to meet the Children the next day, which I did. I had a lot of fun chatting to them about their holidays when they came in, tried to remember their names as much as possible and built some sort of relationship. I still didn't know what I was expected to do the next day. I had been told vaguely that I would spend a few minutes explaining the classroom rules and that would be it. So I made a quick powerpoint so I could explain the rules and leave it to the local teacher after that. I wouldn't teach the following day. On the first day, I was told, ten minutes before my slot that the computer screen isn't working so powerpoints were a no-go. I was then told, with just ten minutes to go that I had to fill forty minutes, not just 'a few'. Great, my first class was going to be totally unprepared, with no materials, no powerpoint, nothing. I scribbled down a quick lesson plan and walked into the class. I introduced the sentence structure for basic rules and then went straight into a game of swapseat, a game where kids run around trying to find a new seat and whoever gets left standing has to complete a sentence. I knew it was too big a class to work smoothly, but with no preparation, I needed to fill up time and I thought that would take twenty minutes. The kids loved it, but it was crazy – too many kids for the game, so I stopped it, 10 minutes in. I reviewed the rules of the classroom and then played a running game. That filled up 10 minutes. I had used up everything I'd 'planned' within half the class. Twenty minutes to fill. I wrote my name on the board and got the kids to ask me questions. That lasted another 10 minutes. I finished up with some Chinese whispers. Honestly, a terrible lesson, but given I'd gone in cold, not a bad effort, if a little crazy. The Chinese staff were full of praise – 'the kids loved you' and all the other compliments flowed. I couldn't help but think they were saying it to be polite, I couldn't imagine that class had impressed anyone.

Later on that afternoon I was able to watch the class getting ready for the term. This seemed to generally be a run through of the classroom routines that they used, standing up and bowing at the start and end of class, opening and closing their books and then going outside and practising a small marching routine that they had to do with two 'generals' that took charge. It was really cute, but at the same time seemed a bit unfair that two children got to be in charge of the others for the whole year.

The next day things improved. I gave a class I had actually planned for and the kids were totally onside after the games I'd played the previous day so it ran smoothly and I managed to regain the credibility I felt I'd lost the day before in front of the other teachers. Then the students were all marched out into the playground, we got in lines and did a Kung Fu routine to music. All of the teachers included. I was standing next to Nina, the Chinese teacher for my class, who was doing the whole routine in a tight skirt that didn't really allow for the movement.

The day carried on and I just observed a few classes and planned for the next few days. The kids went off to PE and one of the children stayed behind because she had her ankle in plaster. She was brought into the teacher's office so she wasn't on her own and then was just left in one of the cubicles to trace around the shapes in her ruler and I got the impression looking at her paper she'd been left to do that every time the others did their marching or Kung Fu so I printed off a quick dot to dot and gave it to her. The school makes you register every time you photocopy something so I didn't know if I'd be allowed and did it quietly so nobody noticed. She did it in about 2 seconds and then shuffled over to show me in front of all the other teachers– my cover was blown. Nobody said anything so I let her choose another one to print out, showed her how to draw a rabbit and then gave her a word search. Not the most entertaining activities but still better than what she was doing before. Lunch time came and I was volunteered by the other teachers to give her a piggy-back to the canteen. The day finished with a birthday party for one of the students – her mother had brought in cake and I got the distinct impression the Chinese teacher was taking a lot of photos of me, presumably to show off the foreign teacher to parents at a later date. There certainly seems to be a lot of things done for the sake of showing the parents what they are paying for, rather than actually benefiting the students.

Chinese dinner

2012-09-01T06:10:00.005-07:00

The Chinese teachers work long hours. There is a huge difference between what is expected of us and what is expected of them. In addition, they don't earn what we earn. Whilst I don't know exactly what they get, I certainly get the impression it's not much.

In my new role, Every foreign teacher gets what's called a 'partner teacher'. Mine is Harmony, a lovely Chinese girl with good English who has a heart of gold. She knocked on the door tonight to suggest we have dinner together as she lives the floor above mine. She had been required to go into work today whilst I, as a foreign teacher had had the day off, so I felt a bit guilty going to her house as a dinner guest rather than the other way round but I accepted and went upstairs.

Her apartment was the same size as mine, but crowded with things. As an expat, I don't own very much 'stuff'. I don't need much. She, on the other hand is a mother of a small baby. The front room was crowded with a cot and pram, a bunk bed for when her mother comes over (the baby lives with her mother, which is quite typical in China) and all the 'stuff' that people who live permanently in one place have. It made the living area tiny. Her husband was there. A police officer (soldier) who spoke next to no English and had prepared a meal. We ate and had the general polite small talk and then, she left to go back to work, leaving me with her husband while I finished eating. I felt hugely guilty that she was back working until late at night while I was chilling out with her husband, but this seems to be the Chinese way. Back in Chongqing, when I had been helping out a businessman I had gone to dinner with his client and found myself eating with his wife while he went to the office so it seems like a normal thing to do, but still odd to me.

I spoke to her husband in Chinese. Despite the clear language barrier we had fun. I learned that he was a helicopter pilot for the police and had been for twelve years. We exchanged lots of little expressions in our respective languages and learned a little about each others' cultures. We drank wine and Baijio (a strong alcoholic drink that doesn't exist in the west) and shook hands more times than seems socially reasonable. He called a friends to tell them that he 'had an English friend over' and needed some language tips. It got to the point I wasn't sure if I was waiting for Harmony to come back or if I was to finish my food and leave. That seemed rude, so I just stayed and chatted while I waited. Somewhere in the discussion the soldier decided to give me some Chinese tea to take home with me. A very nice gesture. Then he added a carton of Orange Juice, which seemed unnecessary but still very kind. We agreed that next time he would come to my apartment and we'd try some English food and drink some more wine and beer. Then, very abruptly he said 'OK', shook my hand and stood up. It was time to leave. I was confused. Maybe I had outstayed my welcome, said something rude. I was unsure, but I shook his hand, thanked him very much for the dinner and re-iterated we would do it again at my place and then left.

As I was unlocking my own door downstairs, he charged down. He said 'hey!' and I turned. He was holding a glass and said in Chinese 'How do I say this in English?' I told him. Then he gave it to me, as a gift. Clearly a nice gesture, clearly I hadn't offended him in any way, it had just been time to go but still, I was pretty confused. I know when I've been to restaurants with Chinese people and at the wedding the locals eat and talk until the food is gone and then just leave, but at someone's house this just seemed odd. I had clearly made a cultural faux-pas by staying after I ate. Hopefully when they come to my place, I'll remember not to be hurt when they eat and run.

Health and safety – Rafting in Wulong

2012-08-28T20:51:00.001-07:00

My head was underwater. I was kicking hard to get my some breath, fighting the bag that had tangled itself around my leg. Everything had come as a bit of a shock. Our raft had hit a rock and we had capsized. This wasn't part of an adventure holiday, one of these things where you can expect a little danger. In fact, it had been a leisurely activity on a day out. Rafting down a lake with a single paddle. It seemed safe. An eleven year old had been on the raft to begin with, to work as a kind of motor, helping us to get going, and had jumped off when we had got onto the 'calm bit'. Twenty minutes later, the current had dragged us into a spin and launched us straight into a rock face. We flipped.

When my head was above water I shouted out for Melanie – I knew she could swim, but being Chinese, there was a strong chance she was a weak swimmer (European pools are filled with kids trying to drown each other in games. Chinese pools tend to be filled with kids desperately clinging to floatation devices). I pushed the boat out of the way so I could see her, she was fine.

I pushed the bag down so I could untangle my leg then pulled it right out of the water. It had my camera in it. I'd been taking photos in the early stages and at Mel's insistence, had packed it away when we heard some shouting ahead of us. We had assumed it was people splashing each other, but as it turned out it was people crashing into the water.

I threw the bag onto Alicia's raft, and then proceeded to swim after my trainers that were floating downstream. Mel was chasing the bag of food that was doing the same.

We swam onto the side and started checking our things. Both our phones were dead. My passport was soggy. The camera had been saved. At some point in the water I'd smashed my foot against a rock, or maybe the bottom of the river.

Looking back into the river, we saw the people who had capsized just before us. It was them making the noise we'd heard. They were back into the calm bit of the river, out of danger. We looked back. Another couple were up against the rock. They hadn't flipped over, but their raft was filling with water and they were slowly going under. It didn't look like they needed rescuing, things were happening so slowly I knew it wasn't going to be a surprise for them when they actually went in the water, so I took a photo. On the opposite bank, another group had stopped and set up a barbecue. They were watching each successive group face that problem section. It didn't seem funny at the time, but looking back I guess I can see why that would have been a fun spot to stop and watch. Still, I can't help but think there should have been some sort of indication, or warning, that a danger spot was coming up or a warning that it wasn't calm all the way down and that some people do capsize. That way we could have at least taken heavy, or valuable, things out of our pockets. Overly cautious health and safety attitudes have pretty much ruined 'fun' in the UK, but a little bit of consideration wouldn't go amiss.

Xintang town

2012-08-28T20:13:00.001-07:00

I arrived at Guangzhou airport and looked around. No-one was waiting for me. Shame. I was expecting to see a sign with my name written on it. It was a Saturday and it was in the school holiday but I had still been told I would be picked up. The truth is I needed to be picked up. I had no idea how to say the name of the school to a taxi driver, I didn’t have it written down in Chinese and I had no clue where it was. My Chinese phone was dead. I plugged it into my laptop and nothing happened. I was in trouble. I had my contact’s mobile number on my English phone and I knew that that was my lifeline if I could borrow a phone and call her, but otherwise I could do nothing but wait and hope she showed up.

Luckily, she did. She had a car waiting for me outside and we set off. I got a quick description of the area but still no information about the class or subjects I would be teaching. It had all been pretty secretive since I got the job and looked like it was going to continue to be so. She dropped me off at the apartment and I set straight off to explore the school and the local area. The school seemed pretty nice, albeit in need of a bit of care.

The moment I got to Xintang town it became obvious that this was a very different part of the country to what I had seen before. Chongqing is a wonderful place for its own reasons. The people are so friendly to outsiders it is unbelievable and the buzz of excitement that follows us round is contagious. It has such a strong and pronounced culture that any expat to live there refers to it comfortably as ‘the real China’. Yet here I was in Xintang town, close to Guangzhou. It still felt like ‘real China’ but it was so different. The street just outside my school was lined mostly with music schools. There was a woman in a Qipao (traditional Chinese dress) teaching a small girl to play a Chinese instrument, and through the window behind her was another girl practicing the piano. In the next few doors were tea shops, hairdressers and what appeared to be a martial arts school. It seemed that this was the China that is shown off to the world.

People seemed to speak to each other in a much more respectful than the tone I heard in Chongqing and there was very little interest in foreigners. As I walked through the street I was looked at occasionally, usually by a young child that maybe wouldn’t have seen many foreigners before but on the whole being a foreigner was no big deal. There were no stares, no buzz of excitement, no people crowded in the shop windows to see the foreigner. The sense of celebrity was gone.

The transition from China – Hong Kong

2012-06-14T09:22:00.003-07:00

Nobody was staring. Nobody was even looking. It didn't matter that I was tall, that I was different, that my nose was too big for my face or that I had hair on my arms. I was not unique any more. I looked around and, whilst I was still in the minority, there were hundreds of us. Foreigners were a part of the life here. We were normal. We were boring. It was horrible. The truth of the matter is that I had become accustomed to my undeserved semi-celebrity status and it felt so strange to be a nobody.

The first night in Hong Kong was a bore. It had the same feel as any city in the west. I saw sky scrapers and shopping malls. I got on the subway to find something different. When I emerged, more sky scrapers, more shopping malls. The city was a drag and I was ready to go home.

Aside from a few 'hey, how are you?'s in the hostel along with a little small talk the first full day was the same. I was fed up.

However, one of those exchanges of small talk ended up paying off. In the hostel, while I was waiting for time to pass before I met up with a school friend who now lived permanently in Hong Kong, I met the girl who did the cleaning in the hostel. She was waiting for her friend, who did the reception work. Her friend came out and the three of us got on pretty well. Both of them were students waiting for their exam results back and working for the hostel until then. As luck would have it, they were also quitting their jobs that night, so when I asked them for travel tips in the city, they suggested we meet up and go sightseeing together the following day, which was pretty cool as I had no idea what I was doing there.

That night I met my old school friend. I hadn't seen her for almost a decade so it was pretty strange. I noticed immediately how much confidence she'd gained since I knew her, but over the night I also realised just how much she remembered about school. Truth be known, I had shut the door behind me as far as school was concerned when I left. I couldn't remember many of the other students she was mentioning and, frankly, wasn't fussed. I heard story after story that went over my head. Her boyfriend joined us later. He was quite an amusing guy. The two of them had met in Birmingham and he had developed a strong brummie accent as a result. I remember growing up I knew a German guy with a strong yorkshire accent, which was amusing, but this was a whole other level.

The next day I met the two girls from the hostel. They were two lovely girls who, as it turned out were NOT university students as I'd thought, but had just finished high school. Rene was a tall, slim, seventeen year old girl who was apparently fancied by all the boys in school. It turned out she lived with her grandmother and two unemployed uncles who shared her bedroom. They had shared a room her entire life. If she wanted privacy, she went to the bathroom. It seemed so strange to me that a seventeen year old girl would share a room with her two uncles in their thirties but she really thought nothing of it. Moon, on the other hand was a twenty year old. She'd been three years older than her classmates her whole life. She shared her room with two of her sisters. Her brother shared a room with her parents. Again, something I couldn't imagine being very practical but it seemed to work. I was trying to work out if this was a case that they were from families in poverty, which was the immediate assumption, but there were lots of little signs of wealth (expensive cameras etc) that made me think it was simply a question of ridiculously high house prices, rather than ridiculously low earnings. Either way, it wasn't my business.

The day was pretty cool. We saw Victoria peak and took a cable tram from the top before going on a ferry ride to see the area a bit more. We took loads of photos and just generally hung out. The girls left me at the hostel for a few hours while they did something 'secret', which I assumed was a job interview but couldn't work out why that would be a secret to a stranger they'd just met and then we met again for dinner. Over dinner, they received a few calls from friends from school and they were passed over to me. It emerged that being a foreigner still had some level of intrigue in Hong Kong, even though not at the same level as it had in China. The girls both said they'd be keen to marry a foreigner and that their friends had the same thoughts. The reason seemed to be that they thought mixed race babies were cuter rather than for any other reason. I'm not entirely sure what reason the Chinese have for that same attitude.

As we left and said our goodbyes I found out where they had disappeared to in the middle of the day. They gave me a card that they had made for me, with photos of all of us that we had taken that day. It thanked me for spending the day with them despite only meeting them the day before. I was touched. It was incredibly thoughtful and, to be honest, surprising. For me, it was they who had done the nice thing by spending time with me, showing me round the city and taking me out, not the other way round.

My China Story - China Daily

2012-06-14T09:13:00.002-07:00

[This post was published first in China Daily - A chinese news website http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/mychinastory/2012-05/07/content_15226475.htm]

Little Red’s interrogation

“You don’t look Chinese” said the little boy, with a thoughtful look as he rolled the possibility through his mind. “You don’t have the face of a Chinese person.”

He was right, I don’t. The conversation had started when the boy approached me, carefully, with a hint of hesitation in his body language and asked me - with no other introduction - if I was a foreigner. I had heard the question in some form or another so many times since my arrival in China that I understood the question and gave my rehearsed response.

“Wo bu shi weiguoren. Wo shi Chongqingren” I said. I’m not a foreigner, I’m a local.

The little boy’s eyebrows shot up. He knew there was something fishy about my story and decided to investigate. His questions took on the form of little red riding hood’s ill-fated meeting with the wolf.

“But you have a moustache” He said. “Your eyebrows don’t look like Chinese eyebrows”. “You have hair on your arms”. The statements kept coming. His mother watched with amusement and added her bit, pointing out my face. My story was unravelling fast. I wasn’t surprised. I was clearly not Chinese. Yet, this was the first time I had had to face an inquisition over the subject. It was the first time I had ever been involuntarily cast as the wolf in little red’s story. But then, this was Chongqing. There were not many foreigners who came to the city. This was not the first time I had been treated differently.

For the last ten months, I have lived and worked in the furnace city. I have been fortunate enough to attend weddings, meetings and all sorts of other traditional Chinese events since I have been here and all of them have followed the common theme; I am a foreigner.

The wedding had been the first such event – I had been invited to attend a wedding of a couple I had never met as a guest of my girlfriend. I was soon asked to be a groomsman and, eventually became the ONLY groomsman. Best man to a guy I didn’t know, I travelled out way into the countryside to stand by his side on his special day. I stood on a stage as three hundred locals stared at the first foreigner they had ever seen. I passed champagne at the right times, held the microphone when I was asked, smiled politely for the photos and thanked guests for coming.

Later on, I met a businessman who wanted me to attend meetings for him in order to give his company an air of internationalism. I agreed and spent the next few weeks being used as a professional foreigner, presenting to crowds of people on subjects I knew nothing about, meeting his business partners, tutoring his business partners’ children and eating with their wives. Professional networks were being formed, and I was the glue to keep them together.

That’s the beauty of China for a foreigner. Whilst this little boy had been determined to single me out as a guy who was different, whilst I can’t walk down a street without people photographing me and pointing out what is obvious, there is rarely any negativity associated with the attention. The people in China are incredible, they offer a level of respect that would never be returned if the situation was reversed and they genuinely take delight in the dealings they have with outsiders.

Rent a foreigner

2012-06-14T09:11:00.001-07:00

Early in the year, I heard that there are agencies throughout China that sign foreigners onto their books and rent them out to various companies. The tasks assigned were usually simply to sit in on board meetings of companies that wanted to appear international or something equally as ridiculous. That seemed pretty interesting to me, partly as I thought it would be quite amusing to have ‘professional foreigner’ as a job title, partly because I liked the idea of being paid just to be me – but I never actually looked into the opportunity.

As it happened, the opportunity found me.

First, I was asked to go and teach a class in a local primary school. Essentially, the school was trying to get some kind of accreditation from the government, they had inspectors coming in that week and HAD to have a native English teacher in front of the kids when the inspectors came. I didn’t really understand why but I agreed.

It wasn’t until I was there that I realised how big a deal this was. I taught three classes of nine year olds back to back. 120 students in just over two hours, which was pretty new to me since I usually taught 15 students maximum. But it was also clearly new to the kids – this was obviously the first class they’d ever had where they were ENCOURAGED to throw a ball about, run to the board, shout out and all the other really active activities that go on in a real TEFL class. There was this buzz of excitement in the room that I just couldn’t explain, but it felt great! At the end of each class kids charged to the front, flocked round me and pushed their books my way, asking for autographs. The second lesson was the class with the inspectors. Not just a guy sitting at the back like I expected. This was an open door class. Crowds of people filled the corridor outside and jammed into the doorway. A guy swiftly manoeuvred around the class with a television camera, watching my every move. Every time I spoke to a student, a woman appeared with her camera to get a snapshot. This was intense.

My next opportunity to be hired as a foreigner was a much bigger affair. I met a guy who was starting a business in Chongqing that worked between the UK and China and had a meeting with a potential client. He wanted the client to see a ‘genuine’ foreigner (he was a BBC-British Born Chinese) and asked me to come to the meeting. I didn’t have to say anything (conversation was in Chinese) but I had to be there. I agreed, thinking this would be a one-time thing.

It wasn’t. The client latched onto the colour of my skin – He wanted me (not my BBC friend) to come in and regularly teach English classes, to present the new partnership between the businesses and…to come and meet his son. Suddenly I was deep into this business. With my new unofficial business partner, I was driven around to the fancy parts of Chongqing, had dumplings with the big director’s wife and gave impromptu English lessons to his son and son’s friends while the household maid scuppered around making tea. I gave a presentation to 200 Non-English speaking students and met officials from the Chinese Government. It was fascinating. I had heard a lot about ‘Guanxie’, the working of personal relationships to achieve business aims, but this is the first time I was able to see it first-hand. Doors were opened for us that never would have been without the help of a little bit of this Guanxie and everything just seemed so easy in a country that is known to be incredibly difficult for foreigners to make business happen.

Are you a foreigner?

2012-02-19T19:51:00.000-08:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rlnelson75/5332712877/

I was waiting for a bus, talking English with a friend when I had my first real Mandarin conversation. A little boy timidly walked towards us with a look of wide eyed bewilderment on his face and a hint of nerves in his voice and said

“Ni men hei shaw Yingwen Ma?”

I had practiced this bit of Chinese thousands of times, so I knew he was asking if we spoke English…I thought it was pretty obvious I did, so I responded with

“Ta hei” (she does).

The follow up question came with the look of bewilderment still on his face…he was looking directly at me now.

“Ni shi Weiguoren ma?”

He was asking me if I was a foreigner. The first person to ask me. Usually people tell me I’m a foreigner. But I responded to him the same way I respond to them.

“Wo bu shi weiguoren. Wo shi Chongqingren”

I’m not a foreigner. I’m from Chongqing.

His look of bewilderment changed into one of disbelief. He had his detective hat on now, one eyebrow raised as he started his interrogation. At this point we had reached the extent of my mandarin in the conversation so I was relying on translations.

He said something in Chinese, which was translated for me as

“Your hair is not the same as a Chinese hair”

I nodded. His mother was giggling and making massive, exaggerated gestures towards herself…

“His face too! Don’t forget his face!”

I guess she was right…my face is different from a Chinese face. Credit to her. But her son was more interested in the detail. Question two of his inquisition.

“Your eyebrows are different from Chinese eyebrows”

He had me on that one too. My story was unravelling fast…I wasn’t particularly shocked he could see through my fake Chongqing origins, but I was surprised he’d taken the little red riding hood investigation technique. Everyone knows how badly that can turn out. I was expecting him to comment on my big eyes next…which also would have been a fair observation…

But instead he chose another point to focus on

“And you have a moustache”.

At this point, I knew the game was up. I considered changing my story to

“Wo shi Weishingren”

(I’m an Alien), but decided better of it…the kid would have torn that story apart even faster…so I came clean…

“OK…Wo shi Yinguoren…nice to meet you”

and shook his hand. His mother prompted his English response

“nice to meet you too”.

And the conversation was over. I had been rumbled and the boy could live in peace knowing that he had successfully singled out a guy for being different.

Celebrations

2012-02-08T00:10:00.001-08:00

I was woken by a crack. An enormous, repetitive crack that shot through the apartment building so loudly it was completely disorienting. I had no idea what was going on outside my body, but inside my body I was intensely aware of the sudden burst of adrenaline shooting through my veins. This was the fight or flight instinct kicking in. I had never felt it before in such a way, but I knew that’s what it was. I was out of bed instantaneously, checking all around the room for the solution to whatever was going on. Was something on fire? Did it need to be unplugged? Was something breaking?

It suddenly dawned on me what I’d heard. This was a firework. It had been set off in the stairwell of our building just meters from our window. Welcome to Chinese New Year.

They have an obsession with fireworks here, as well as a blatant disregard for the danger that they present to people in the vicinity.

I had been taken to Bi Shan to celebrate the New Year festival. Apparently this is an event that involves eating meals with your entire family. I was aware this would be punctuated with fireworks but had no idea to what extent. I was eating with a different family every two hours. I was taken from cold house to cold house to join people, wrapped up in coats and scarves as tradition appears to dictate that nobody uses heating, ever. This may be a leftover from a government order that everyone to the north of the country was given central heating, everybody to the south was forbidden from having it, but for whatever reason sitting in the freezing cold when there is a perfectly good wall heater in the room seemed ridiculous.

We would eat. We would drink. We would toast each other. People would do shots with the Lao Wei (me). Then we would move onto a new house and eat, drink, toast each other and do shots with the Lao Wei. This continued for six days. After one day of heavy drinking, the Chinese appeared to take it in turns to have a day off. The Lao Wei was never given the option. Six days went past in a cold, drunken haze.

It wasn’t only eating and drinking. We’d also pay respects to my hosts’ ancestors. This involved going to their gravesides -including some up mountains which involved huge treks -burning fake money as an offering to them in the afterlife and then blowing the snot out of the grave with fireworks. This was terrifying. Fireworks were going off all around us. Loud, disorienting, bright and dangerous fireworks, were set off with no warning, inches from where we were standing or walking. Shells were falling all around us, from all directions as families all across the mountainside were blowing bits off their ancestors’ tombs in what seemed to be a strange blend of utmost respect and the complete opposite.

Fireworks continued to blow up all around us for the whole stay. Children on the street would be holding fireworks that blew little shots off at people close to them. These were fireworks ‘designed for children’ – a concept I’d never heard of. Walking through the streets was like walking through a warzone, rockets were set off between buildings, on pedestrianized shopping zones and on the pavements. Teenagers were setting fire to strings of explosives and running round the street, spinning them around as they went with a complete disregard for the people who were out and about. Police were nowhere to be seen. Maybe they felt it was safer to be indoors. Maybe they felt it was just a bit of fun. Maybe they just didn’t care.

Donald duck

2012-02-08T00:09:00.000-08:00

Walking through Chongqing, I came across the Disney characters doing some sort of a promotional event. There, in amongst his numerous other Disney mascots, was Donald Duck. Donald, it has to be said, was my childhood hero. My entire childhood I had a picture of him on my wall, which never came down and I’d loved his show more than any other in my early years. He’d always been a challenge to me though. I’d been to Disneyland twice to see him and he wasn’t there, not working for some reason.

But there he was, in the centre of Chongqing. This was my chance to meet my hero. So I bravely walked up to him, tapped him on the shoulder and sheepishly asked to take a photo with him, shaking my camera so he knew what I meant. I was grinning happily at the camera, getting a sense that the guy inside the Donald suit was perhaps more excited than I was, being photographed with a Lao Wei, when I felt a hand tapping me on the shoulder. I turned around to see who it was and there, standing sheepishly in front of me shaking his camera, asking to take a photo with me, was another Disney mascot – dressed as an Alien, who clearly couldn’t contain his excitement at meeting a foreigner.

Blatant racism

2012-02-08T00:07:00.001-08:00

One of the nice things about being a foreign person here is that foreigners are so rare that we are treated as though we hold an almost celebrity status. But there is a flip side to that. In the UK, people are brought up in a society in which they will at least come into contact with people from a variety of ethnicities, nationalities and cultures so even though there are some closed minded racists in the UK, they are certainly the minority. Most people are comfortable around people who are different and don’t think anything of it. They also have a good idea of what is appropriate to say about others and what isn’t.

The Chinese, it seems, don’t have this kind of experience growing up in this part of China. As a result, they constantly stare at white foreigners, insist on saying “hello” and “welcome to Chongqing” when they see you randomly on the street. For other foreigners, things aren’t so great. You’ll regularly hear Chinese girls state outright that they would never date a black guy, or make some kind of degrading reference to Indians. Closer to home, the Chinese are horribly anti-Japanese due to the horrors committed in WWII. Teaching a class on nationalities, one of my students suddenly announced ‘I don’t like Japanese’. Rather than correct his English (He was clearly NOT referring to the language), I just said “You can’t say that!” knowing full well that it was a view commonly held by the Chinese as I’d heard similar comments so many times before. This was confirmed when immediately all the other students decided to justify why none of them liked the Japanese, citing the massacre at Nanjing and whatever else they could think of, which had clearly been taught to them (passionately) from Grandparents and teachers alike.

For someone who comes from a very different background, it’s sometimes hard to remember that not every culture has the same ideas of tolerance and acceptance built into their upbringing that we have.

The Chinese Wedding

2011-10-16T20:39:00.000-07:00

Maybe three hundred jaws were dropped, eyes constantly focussing on the 6’3 white guy standing at the altar, waiting for their sister, cousin, daughter, niece or whatever other relation to bride was to them. Partly because they had never seen a foreigner before - frankly, almost no one in the city had – and partly because they were wondering what I had to do with the wedding. It was not my own.

A few weeks ago I had been told by the girlfriend that we would be attending the wedding of her cousin. Naturally, I was excited – this is one of those cultural experiences not every foreigner who comes to the country is going to get, so it was kind of a rare privilege.

A few days later it didn’t seem so fun anymore. It seemed terrifying. My services had been offered as a groomsman and that had been accepted. I was actually going take part in the wedding. The girlfriend told her mother what I had been asked to do, and the immediate response was “You should get paid to do that! You can get at least 200 RMB”…It seemed somewhat surprising at the time since we had actually offered to do it. I stated outright that I wasn’t taking any money for it. It would be a gift to the couple.

Very little information was given to me about the wedding and what I would be asked to do. I was told not to dress up, jeans would be ok. I was told I would be drinking on behalf of the groom (which somewhat concerned me as research on the internet suggested a Laowei would be drunk whether or not he was drinking on behalf of the groom) and I was told that I had to start referring to family members by names such as Jia Jia (Older sister) or Meimei (Little sister) as that’s what family do. It didn’t bother me as I couldn’t pronounce anyone’s names anyway, except that I was doing this ‘as part of’ my girlfriend, which meant that I would refer to a girl younger than myself as my older sister simply because they were older than her. That seemed odd, and I was pretty determined to use the Meimei phrase based on my own age rather than hers. Other than that, I heard nothing.

The whole of the bride’s family and I were stuffed in the back of a minibus, and drove for seven hours to a ‘place out in the country’, which was in fact a city but it was indeed over considerable stretches of dirt tracks and unbuilt roads.

As soon as I got out of the bus the other end it became apparent that this city was in another league to Chongqing. We got out next to what looked like a Laundromat (but can’t have been – Laundromats don’t exist here, as Chinese people don’t like using machines that might have been used to wash someone else’s clothes, according to a business woman I met here) and a crowd gathered immediately at the door. Heads turned as I walked down the street. People did double-takes. People changed direction to get a second stare. Others stopped in their tracks to look. This was what I had felt like the first time I arrived in Chongqing, but was on such a different level.

After a meal with the other relatives and a few rounds of the traditional cheers’ing that goes on at Chinese meal times we went to bed for an early start the next day. I met the bride and groom to be and they let me know that the host of the wedding would bring me up on stage and ask me some questions in Chinese so that I could fail to understand and respond and it would be really funny. I realised at that point that humiliating the foreigner was going to be amusing for everyone…else.

The next morning things started bright and early in the same way you’d imagine the girls’ side of a wedding to start. The bride was running around getting her makeup done, getting dressed and suchlike, her little sister sitting around in a puffy white dress (eating, as she did the entire day – making it impossible to take any photographs of her) and the family just buzzing around doing preparation type things.

Then it became Chinese.

The bride’s family all crowds into one of the rooms, ‘kidnapping’ the bride, who sits at the far end of the room, with the family barricading the door. The Groom then arrives and the bride is only released after he pays a bribe to her family for her release. We hear a hustle and bustle outside, he has reached the first set of family members and shortly after knocks on the door, presumably having given them sufficient bribes…the whole family crams against the door to hold it shut, then opens it a crack so he can send his bribe through. He squeezes his arm through the gap and throws a pile of little red envelopes into the air and the family literally dive away from the door, onto the ground to wrestle for the envelopes.

The groom bursts in. He sings a song for the bride, bunch of flowers in hand and starts to move towards her. He’s blocked by more family members, who have clambered over the bed to get in the way. He pays more bribes. There’s more wrestling on the floor and he eventually makes it to the bride, gets down on one knee and said something to her I couldn’t understand. Slips some red shoes onto her feet (although I didn’t notice him bringing them in), and they leave together – both families in tow, and paying various bribes en route to the children who were carrying the train of the dress.

We got into cars. At this point it emerged that I was the only groomsman, not just one of a crowd. I was sharing the head car with the bride and groom and my girlfriend. Even the bride’s sister (who I had assumed was the bridesmaid) was put in a different car, mouth still full of whatever she’d found. The cars drove in convoy, and stopped occasionally. My job was to get out at every specified stop and give two cigarettes to each of the drivers.

We drove to the Yangtze river, the couple got out of the car and went to make promises to each other facing the river, with all the children attending the wedding crowded round them (but strangely, none of the adults to be seen).

We arrived at the grooms family’s house and the couple went into one of the back bedrooms to make a bed before the wedding (after bribing the groom’s mother to get into the room of course). This is apparently a tradition that is supposed to mean that, after the couple has children the house itself will be more manageable and well organised.

They got back in the car for the final stretch and the bride’s sister reclaimed her rightful place in the head car - squeezing pretty much onto my lap in the front seat, with a bag of nuts in hand that she’d found in the groom’s parents’ house. We arrived at the restaurant we’d been to the previous night, although now it was filled with people. Hundreds of them. There was a stage set up that looked like something off a talent show, bubbles spraying and neon lights and all. I went inside and stood at the front to wait for the couple, all eyes on me. I was told by the host to go to the back for the start of the wedding. My role was to lead the couple to the alter with candle in hand. Then stand at the alter with them, giving them drinks or microphones when instructed to by one of the side hands. Something I was particularly bad at given the side hand spoke Chinese and I don’t.

But the wedding went on fine, no hiccups caused by me. The ceremony was simple, albeit with the air of a local talent show. There was a speech by the groom’s father and then was just over. The couple threw the bouquet (stuffed with red envelopes and money) and the single people wrestled for it. As soon as the couple left the stage people started eating. I never had to drink for the groom and I wasn’t dragged on stage for the humiliation session. When the food was gone, the guests stood up and left. There was no hanging about. We said our goodbye’s and started the long journey back. The couple went to work the next day. And my girlfriend had picked up a red envelope for me. I had been paid afterall.

It had seemed like the whole wedding had concentrated around money. The bribes being paid over the day had ony been 2 RMB at a time, but had surely added up. The groom had at one point said to me (flustered) that he had run out of money – he hadn’t prepared enough envelopes. But strangely, the wedding was still really sweet, all of the bribery wasn’t born of greed, but rather tradition.

Public services and serving the public

2011-09-22T01:08:00.000-07:00

Not too long ago, I was walking through Jie Fang Bie at night with a friend. We saw a young boy, probably about 10 or 11 years old sitting on one of the sculptures on the pavement. He had blood across his face. Not flowing, but clearly it had been recently. His eyes were red, glazed over and he was shaking violently. He looked dirty, carried a big ruck sack and was in a real state. Not crying as such, but clearly having some emotions running through him, taking over his body, paralysing him.

We approached him. I was nothing more than an observer due to the language barrier, but as my friend asked what was wrong, he said nothing to her. Another woman approached. It wasn’t clear to me if she had seen the incident or was guessing, but she said the boy was homeless. He had been in a fight with another homeless boy and hit in the face with an iron rod.

He looked terrible. He needed help. The people around him were talking, but he stayed quiet. They were discussing whether or not to call an ambulance. This seemed a strange thing to discuss for me, as it would have been an immediate reaction at home, instinct even. Yet here we were, the subject under discussion. I didn’t understand anything beyond what was translated for me during the conversation, but the crux of it was that nobody was sure whether to call anyone because the boy was homeless, so nobody would help him. The debate continued. Eventually, someone picked up their phone and began calling somebody. I don’t know who. Then suddenly, out of the blue the boy stood and limped away into the night, the woman on the phone chasing after him. As we walked on, the rest of the conversation was translated to me. The boy had been hit right outside Suning, a major electrical store. That in itself wasn’t strange. What was strange was that between where we saw the boy and the Suning, there was a Police Station. Not a station positioned indoors, but rather a big tent, with open sides where the police sit…the boy must have walked straight past them , they can’t have missed him. Yet he was there, the other side. The police hadn’t even made an effort.

This wasn’t the first time I’d seen the Police fail to do anything for the public, I’d already witnessed their lack of interest first hand during the forest fire, so it did raise the question – what do the authorities here actually do?

This was answered a few days later, when I went to a street barbecue that I frequently visit. The whole street fills with vendors, and people from all over the city come to eat there late at night. Strictly speaking, the whole operation is illegal, and some nights the vendors are warned not to come because an official is visiting, but the rest of the time it goes ahead, as it’s the way of life for many of these people. But that night, it was raining, the vendors were out as usual, and the crowds were huddled under canvas sheets to eat, as usual. Then, quickly, the streets began to clear. The stands that were there disappeared almost immediately. I looked around and saw 3 men, dressed in what looked like official military dress marching through the street, telling people to clear off. Our street vendor picked up his stand - barbecue still burning- and rested it on his head. He walked round the corner and set it down out of sight of these officers. It dawned on me then that the public services are not in place to serve the public as we’d expect, but rather to enforce the law and to ensure that everyone knows who is in charge

Fading Chinese Traditions

2011-09-13T20:33:00.000-07:00

9^th September (on the lunar calendar, which worked out to September 12^th this year) is celebrated as the moon festival, a day where the moon is at its biggest, brightest and most beautiful. People eat a lot of Moon Cake ( a cake that is said to resemble the moon, and contains a variety of fillings, from cooked whole egg yolks, to a blend of meat and rosepetals, to just a cake-like substance inside) and, apparently, teachers receive gifts from students and their parents in an effort to gain favour. Rules have changed now so these gifts can’t be money, but often take the form of supermarket gift cards or simply fruit and vegetables…or moon cake. The celebration sounds similar to, albeit less tasty than, the exchange of Easter eggs in the west, with a teachers’ daughter saying that she often receives so much moon cake from her parents’ students that she can never finish it herself.

Traditionally, Chinese would spend the evening with their friends and family, watching the moon and eating the moon cake. Apparently, however, most young Chinese have no interest in the tradition and don’t celebrate it so it is beginning to turn into just another day. From the sound of it, this is happening across the board and the Chinese are celebrating less and less of their own traditions, reverting more to the more popular western celebrations instead.

On August 6^th, the Chinese celebrate their version of Valentines day. According to a Chinese friend, It comes from a story where a handsome man and a beautiful woman fell in love and a powerful queen used her magic to keep them apart. For whatever reason, they couldn’t see each other again except once a year on August 6^th so lovers should spend that day together. However, there also appears to be something similar every month so the day isn’t really celebrated with much romance. Instead, the Chinese tend to be more romantic on 14^th of February – the western Valentine’s day.

What’s more sad about it, is the way in which they celebrate the Western celebrations. Christmas day apparently consists of many people going into the street, getting drunk and (usually) fighting. This happened so much that the Police have cracked down on it, and it is now impossible to get into the Jie Fang Bei area of town on the day as vehicles are forbidden entry.

Fire at the school

2011-09-03T02:41:00.000-07:00

For the second time in 5 days, I was escaping from a fire. This one was certainly not in the same league as the last. It was the shopping mall where the school is based. Not an unusual situation. In fact, I’ve evacuated many buildings in the UK as a result of fire risk.

But there is a difference. Namely, there was no procedure at all for the fire here. In the UK, a fire alarm goes off, and people calmly and carefully evacuate via fire exits which are clearly marked. More often than not, designated fire marshals lead people down these fire exits to an agreed fire assembly point and a register is taken.

This isn’t the UK. Clearly. There was no alarm, my class was interrupted by a Chinese woman teling me there was a fire on the 4th floor. I ask her to tell my Students in Chinese, as it’s not the time to see how much English they understand. She tells them in a panicked voice and they all scream and stand up urgently…Have they never had a fire drill? I tell them to calm down, get them into a line and lead them to one of the receptionists, who appears to know where the fire assembly point is. They walk calmly out of the school. I take a quick look in the office to see if anyone has been left behind, but everyone seems to be en route so I follow up behind.

This is not a drill. It’s a real fire, smoke is all over the place. But there’s no fire exit, people are going down the escalators, which are still running. People are walking all over the place, there’s no order. We go outside and people are just kind of hanging about. Students call their parents and go home, no registers are done, nobody expects one. That wasn’t all that strange though….what was strange, was that people were still calmly going into the building as if they were just carrying on their shopping. There was nobody to stop them going in, nobody informing them of what was going on. No fire engines, no police, no alarm…it seemed people were just left to discover the smoke for themselves, to fend for themselves…which just seems to be the way in a fire here.

The heat excuse

2011-09-01T07:50:00.000-07:00

When the temperature hits 40 degrees (C) , the government gives workers the day off and Students don’t have to attend lectures at university. Rumour has it, that this leads to the government publishing false figures for the temperature, coming in regularly at 39. However, occasionally, the temperature hits 40 and above. Construction sites quieten down but nothing else really seems to change. Workers still work, restaurants are still open and shopping centres still look like normal. That said, this strange rule that doesn’t appear to actually apply does seem to have integrated itself into chinese culture to create an odd attitude toward the heat. In our office, the woman who is supposed to open the doors in the meeting comes in late, because ‘it’s too hot and the aircon doesn’t come on until later’, Children who are expected for classes don’t show up because of the weather, and people stay at home rather than risk going out into the heat. The whole country becomes one of excuses, changing routines and avoiding anything they can if it means getting too hot.

Honesty

2011-09-01T07:48:00.000-07:00

In a strange contrast to this, in many ways the Chinese are, as a whole, surprisingly honest – to an extent that seems almost absurd. In many countries, you can hear the rhyme ‘see a penny, pick it up and all day long you’ll have good luck.’ . That isn’t the case in China. Here, if somebody drops money, that is considered to be incredibly unlucky and if somebody else were to take that money, they would also take all of the bad luck with it. I guess it must be for that reason that many Chinese people will literally chase you to give you money back if you drop it. I was chased up an elevator by a sales clerk after I forgot to get my change as she was desperate for me to get it back. I appreciated it and thanked her accordingly, but I was stunned to see that she had made that effort for what equated to just 3 pence back home. Similarly, I dropped 5 RMB (about 50 pence) getting off a bus and a girl, probably about 18 years old, ran after me across a distance far too long for it to be worth the effort to give it back to me…presumably determined not to take my bad luck. I’m stunned that a country that is so heavily involved with corruption (taking people’s money), would be so full of people who are so determined to AVOID taking people’s money.

Corruption and bribery in China

2011-09-01T07:47:00.000-07:00

Whilst I haven’t had any issues with people demanding money in order for them to do anything for me, bribery is still rife in China and people do make decisions based on the money that is given to them. What I hadn’t realised, however, is that the Chinese use bribery, with the help of their families, to aid their careers. I was speaking to a girl who spoke proudly about her new job with a major international airline. Due to confusion in the language barrier I didn’t know if she had the job or wanted the job so I asked what stage she was in the interview process… She then told me that there was no interview process, she just gave some money to the decision maker and she was starting her training in November. It was news to me that someone could buy their way into a job so obviously I asked how much she’d paid and how she knew what to pay, what to do etc. As it turns out, her aunt new the decision maker and advised her on how big the bribe should be, in this case, 80,000 RMB (about £8k) and once the money was paid, everything just fell into place easily. Another friend, with us at the time, announced that she had done the same thing to get into university but couldn’t remember the amount. I couldn’t help but feel that getting a job, and going to university should be based on merit and that I would feel that I had been robbed if I had to give someone money just to make a decision they should have made as part of their job anyway, but the Chinese girls both insisted that this is just how things are done here.

The Fire in Bamboo Forest

2011-08-31T18:26:00.001-07:00

The ashes were falling everywhere, smoke filled the air and we could hear the chopping of bamboo behind us. We were running, trying to get cars to pull over and give us a lift down the mountain but nobody would stop. Some waved, some made gestures that almost passed for apology, but the cars kept moving and we kept running.

It had seemed like such a good idea to begin with. We were visiting the bamboo forest where ‘house of flying daggers’ had been filmed. We’d walked miles before jumping in a bus to get up to where the actual forest trail began and stopped for a meal in one of the tiny air conditioned huts, completely oblivious to what was happening so close to us.

As we finished our meal, we saw the first sign of problems…cars filled the roads down the mountain, honking and manoeuvring their way down the mountain. The guy from one of the stores told us they were fleeing to avoid the traffic due to the forest fire and he pointed to one of the nearby mountains, where we could see a plume of smoke rising. This wasn’t the mountain we were about to climb and we were assured that our mountain was far enough away for it to be safe…so we began to climb, taking this random stranger’s word that it was alright.

The forest was great, the scenery spectacular and the things to see were interesting, but the smell of smoke got stronger, and the ashes began to fall all around us. We continued to climb, but not for long. At the first point where we could see the other mountain, it became obvious the smoke had become darker, the fire bigger. It wasn’t on our mountain, but it looked close enough to spread, so we dropped to the bottom of the mountain, knowing that if we got trapped up there, it would be our own stupid faults.

We got back to the cabins, which seemed much quieter than they had been earlier as most people had already fled. We were told that the bus we had expected to come and pick us up was not coming so we needed to walk to where it had picked us up the first time and catch it back down the mountain from there…so we walked, towards the smoke, as it was the only way down. It took a while. It was hot and some of the people in the group were already struggling with the smell of smoke, even though it wasn’t that strong yet.

We passed some police officers, who told us to run, as the smoke was coming down the mountain and if it got to the road, there would be no buses to pick us up. We got to the bus stop and there were no buses. It must have almost reached the road. We had to keep going. Cars were driving past us down the mountain, buses full of police, army guys and fire fighters were driving up. Nobody stopped for us, they just kept driving.

The situation suddenly became much more serious when we saw armies of people chopping down the bamboo right next to us, as the fire was spreading fast and this would help stop the spread. We kept running, faster now. Every time we saw a place with buses, army guys and the like collecting we would stop and ask about transport down – we were told to just keep going.

We eventually passed some motorbike taxis and managed to call them to us. They said they’d take us down the mountain for 30 RMB but there were only 3 bikes, and 8 people so 2 would have to keep walking until we found another bike. We went around the corner so the Police could not see, for a reason that wasn’t explained to me and we put 3 of the girls onto the first two bikes with one guy who was choking heavily in the smoke and they left. Then, the unexpected happened. One of our 4 freaked out. Literally, just freaked out. He wouldn’t go on the motorbike. He was terrified. It turned out he’d had an accident as a child and hadn’t managed since. He was going to walk.

Suddenly the plan changed. He would walk. I wasn’t about to let another guy walk by himself. We were a group, we would stay together, so I stayed, telling the two people with us to leave. They had the same feeling as me. They weren’t about to let 2 guys go on foot while they disappeared on a motorbike. Especially as the 2 guys only spoke English in a part of China where no-one could say a word of it. So they would come on foot with us. We argued briefly, but then just carried on running, to the complete bewilderment of the motorbike taxi driver. We passed more bikes, who offered to pick us up, and reacted with the same surprise as the first when we refused.

A bus went past us, almost empty. Loads of empty buses had passed us already and not stopped and our infuriation was rising… We shouted at the bus and it carried on. We started swearing in anger. It slowed down…we carried on running for it…and then we got lucky. It stopped.

We got on, relieved and delighted at our luck. I didn’t understand what the driver was saying, but he kept repeating the words ‘Lao Wei’, which mean ‘foreigner’. Our Chinese host explained that he had only stopped because we were foreigners…essentially, the drivers were not allowed to take people down the hill to safety, and the police would give them trouble if they were caught…they were only allowed to drive people up the mountain to help with the fire effort. This was shocking, and I didn’t really believe it. But there we were on a bus, the driver having stopped for us…we saw other people who needed help, waving frantically at the driver to stop and naturally expected him to… but he continued driving down the mountain, and it dawned on me that the reason he had stopped really was because we were foreign…the guilt mounted pretty quickly that we were treated so differently and the fact that the emergency services not only failed to arrange transport for people to get off the mountain but that the police actually prevented them getting any help was shocking and really showed that the perception of the value of human life here is so much less than the value we place on it back home.

An impression of Chongqing

2011-08-31T07:58:00.000-07:00

It's next to impossible to get a video uploaded onto Youtube here, even with a proxy/vpn, so I've uploaded a video showing the things I saw in my first few weeks in the city onto Youku. I forgot to credit it in my upload, and can't work out how to change the details using the chinese instructions, but the music is by Kevin Macleod.

An impression of Chongqing

From Videos

Toilets

2011-08-06T01:02:00.000-07:00

Before I arrived, I was told to bring toilet paper with me whenever I use a public toilet, because people go in, steal all the toilet paper and try and sell it to you outside. To be honest, I wish this was the case. In actual fact, the toilets are never even stocked with paper and there is no soap in the dispensers…in addition to this, the toilets are pretty disgusting. Even the fancy hotels, restaurants and shopping centres rarely have more than a squatter which is usually not clean and, because they block easily if too much paper is put down, they normally have a bin full of used paper beside them so the smell is horrific. Not only this, but squatters are surprisingly difficult to use, there is so much to do at once, ranging from moving your trousers out the way so they don’t get anything on them right the way through to balancing on the little footsteps. One suggestion I hear regularly is to just remove the trousers altogether, as that eradicates the problem.

That said, there is one similarity to the UK…in that often in bars and nightclubs, there is someone in the toilets waiting for customers, giving them towels and pushing the taps on for them, then asking for tips for the service most customers would frankly prefer to do for themselves…however, one oddity is that unlike the UK toilet attendants, the chinese guys often will massage your shoulders while you relieve yourself…that’s added value right there!

Street dancing

2011-08-06T01:01:00.000-07:00

This is really common here – not long after arriving in Chongqing I was walking through one of the main squares and saw thousands of people out on the street in perfectly straight lines, dancing to music blaring out of speakers overhead. I pulled out my camera to film them, and messaged all my friends to tell them there was a festival going on that they were missing. As it happens, there was no festival; this is just something the retired folk do every night as exercise. It’s fascinating to watch, and is usually accompanied by a laser display into the fountain.

Celebrity

2011-08-06T00:58:00.000-07:00

There really aren’t a lot of foreigners in this part of china. For most Chinese people when you meet them, there’s a really good chance that you will be the only foreigner they have ever met. This creates a strange kind of pseudo celebrity out of you. Since I’ve been in the city, stares have been frequent – the local people are fascinated by my presence. The waiting staff photograph me when I go to restaurants, the pub goers tap me on the shoulder and buy me drinks, language students sit with me and strike up a conversation about whatever they can if I sit somewhere alone and most people who make eye contact smile or giggle to their friends. All this attention can be incredibly flattering, but at times quite intrusive. I went for a date with a girl I’d met walking through the city and spent the whole night shaking hands with people who’d never met a foreigner and were keen to take up the chance and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been midway through a meal when I’ve been interrupted by someone for the same reason. Today I was eating a meal as a summer club group of children walked past and I really felt like a circus act as they took turns to notice me, point at me and then come over to stare at me from close up while their teachers (for want of a better word) just watched them do it, with no attempt to move them on.