Mice Love Rice - Beijing 2006
I am just adding the finishing touches to this, barely twelve hours into the dawn of my third decade. Everyone says that 20 is a grown-up, responsible age and that I’m getting to be a real adult…
I don’t feel any different though.
In fact, it reminds me a little of a question I frequently get asked on visits to China: “so, you’re half English, born and brought-up in the UK and now go to university in Edinburgh… are you used to the foreigners yet?”
And so, dear foreigners (and non-foreigners), I bring to you this latest instalment of my travelling adventures…
*This is quite a long one, I’m afraid… but it's still shorter than the first draft I subjected my parents to... Lucky you.
Enjoy :)
Love,
Sonny
xxx
Mice Love Rice
1st - 23rd August 2006
‘What blood type are you?’
It was nearing midnight in the murky Beijing hutong and mosquitoes buzzed in the pale lamplight under which the two men and I were squatting. For a chat-up line, I’d give it full marks for originality - if it wasn’t for the fact that it came from someone I was just respectfully wondering whether to call ‘uncle’ or ‘grandfather’ - that and the fact that he was attempting to manhandle my thigh like something he’d buy at the local market.
‘Leave the girl alone!’ said the other man, definitely a ‘grandfather’, as he lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of his first and spat energetically into a pile of bricks further along the street,
‘You’ve got to excuse us night-cats,’ he said, taking a fresh puff of tobacco, ‘staying out and killing time is what we do all summer - that and sleeping during the day...’ he yawned lazily and swatted a mosquito on his bare stomach, ‘mind you, it’s been a lot more interesting since the builders moved in…’
This is nocturnal Beijing, a city that I’ve gotten to know and love over the last three weeks, full of late-opening cafes, bars and odd shops, busy streets buzzing with neon lights and red lanterns, traders’ tricycles and street stalls, elderly couples waving large fans, toddlers with open-seated trousers and squashy-faced dogs playing amongst the trees and trenches…
Trenches?
Ah yes. Amongst this night-time throng, groups of khaki-clad builders are still hard at work digging up, filling in, cementing and repaving; a continuous process of destruction and reconstruction that has been going on in Beijing for as long as many of its residents can remember. Out of these vast building sites rise a plethora of globular or angular ‘modern’ structures, as well as varying pastiches of old Beijing with her narrow streets and low-rise courtyard-houses. It is an architect’s anarchic playground, a demolition team’s nirvana and home to about 1.2billion people, three of whom are my grandparents (on my mum’s side) and my dad.
So I was back in the capital.
My previous trips to China had often been tinged with an uncertain sense of unease: my pronounced Beijing accent gave little clue to my 7-year-old’s vocabulary and inability to read or write, which often lead to confusion and long explanations, while I found the apparent inability for anyone to recognise that I am in fact my dad’s daughter (and not his tourguide or child-bride) embarrassing, to say the least. But now, two years since my last visit, the circumstances have changed. For one thing, I am living in a new area in the centre of town (dad having found a place of his own), far removed from the great, hulking tenement blocks of my grandparents’ flat which, combined with the (of course kindly and well-intentioned) protectiveness of the grandparents, always manages to revert me to the mental-age of about seven, overfed and cosseted from the outside world.
As soon as I could this time, I grabbed a map and set out into the rippling heat, exploring as much of the area surrounding dad’s new neighbourhood as the umidity (and my varying ability to get up in the morning) allowed: the lakes surrounded by tree-lined walkways, fishermen, lovers and squatting swimmers glistening like seals on its banks; the patchwork of hutongs and modern blocks, cicada-hushed streets and terrifying uncrossable six-lane highways; colourful street stalls and semi-soviet apartment stores, tiny bustling dumpling bars and pagoda-style megaliths with gilded waitresses and arctic air-conditioning.
Wow… why haven’t I seen any of this before?
Looking into a murky green lake one afternoon, I tried to ask one of the old fishermen what he could catch there.
“Nowt!” he grunted rather violently, and spat into the lake.
A young man, possibly the fisherman’s son, was swimming out towards the centre of the water, apparently with the line in his mouth. The old man directed him with jerks of his bamboo fishing rod.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” a voice from my left. The speaker was Mr Wang, a retired antiques-dealer and old-Beijinger. Now that his business days are over, he spends most of his time by the waterside, a self-confessed idler and materialist: “the fishermen’s hobby is to catch fish and put them back,” he’d say proudly over the three-hour conversation that followed, “but me - I’m even more useless. I just watch!” The materialist bit came from his trade in antiques, “my favourite antiques…? Anything that makes me money!” he exclaimed without a hint of irony, “I don’t even feel right looking at a piece, no matter how beautiful or ornate, until I know that it can earn me some real dough…” But the more I talked with Mr Wang, the more I grew to like his often-contradictory views on life. As is the way with many conversations with your elders in China, much of it centred on life-advice: “always do something you’re interested in,” he said gravely at one point, “even if it’s not the most well-paid. I really loved my antiques…” and on the subject of love and marriage (something that I was asked by a lot of Chinese people - ‘will you marry a Chinese person or a foreigner?’) I was advised to, “think practically! There’s too much of that airy-fairy romance among young people these days. You need to consider if the man can earn money, comes from a reputable family…” but also, “never forget the power of true love - I expect you’re too young to know the meaning of that yet -but life’s not just about money you know. True love is something that goes beyond material things and national boundaries. Don’t give your life away for material things…” There seemed to be something dreamily melancholic about Mr Wang when he said these things, contrasting from the former advice, which suddenly sounded recited, as if learnt from centuries of repeated cultural and parental wisdom.
And so it was, that after decrying the uselessness of the arts for making money (“what use is going to a good university to study literature? Why not business?”), Mr Wang went on to his passion for tang poetry..
Contemplation on a Moonlit Night
Before my bed the moon shines bright,
Frost-like on this starless night.
I raise my head to the lunar glow
But lower it now to thoughts of home.
and
Spring Morning
No sleep outlasts the dawn in spring;
All-over birds will chirp and sing.
Yet night-time brought the wind and rain…
How many blossoms fell today?
[by Tang poets Li Bai and Meng Haoran; my own (rather shaky) translations]
Poems that I learnt by rote in my two years at Beijing Experimental Primary School and hardly thought about since, the meanings elusive in the old-fashioned words and awkward grammar. Mr Wang explained how the poem about spring referred to a great Chinese text, The Dream of the Red Mansions - of how the story’s hero buried the blossoms in his courtyard as a symbol of the loved-ones he had lost… Straying from his so-far rather formal tone, he went on to describe the debauchery that took place in the ancient Chinese court, “you’d think from what they teach you at school that all those ancient courtiers were terribly prim and correct… not a bit of it!” he laughed, “as one famous courtesan put it, ‘the fleas and bedbugs in my mattress are cleaner than those who lie on top of it!’”
Back at dad’s apartment, I went through some of his books on Tang poetry (with translations). The language was often hard and obscure, but fascinating in a way that I’d never quite realised before. These weren’t just school exercises written exclusively for vocab-building and young-pioneer patriotism (like the parables on Mao’s heroism rescuing dying soldiers that we also had to learn). These were by real people - passions, emotions, sex… long-haired poets and eccentrics, scholars and philosophers… At the risk of sounding like something out of 1984, I began to understand how different life was before Communism, through texts rescued from a time before the Cultural Revolution came along to burn books, beat up academics and behead statues.
One of my other introductions to Chinese arts and culture came in the form of Mice Love Rice. Ohyes, this was the song in Beijing at the time of my visit, a tinkly, bunniesandrainbows-type song with some obscure storyline about a blind girl, a fat kid and a reincarnated mouse. As the song in the capital of piracy, it was, of course, everywhere. It drifted out of shops and restaurants, airports and trainstations, lifts and toilets, even my mobile, with its government-issued (!) dialtune had it on a manic loop whenever anyone tried to call. Throughout my stay in Beijing, the maddeningly catchy chorus seeped into my every pore and orifice:
“I love you, I love you, just like mice love rice!”
To get away from this squeaky, sugar-coated bit of earnoise, dad, a couple of friends and I decided to get out of Beijing for a few days to see what the rest of the country was listening to. We travelled to Yen’an, a town in Northern China famed for its cave dwellings and a key sightseeing place for the ultimate revolutionary experience: Red Tourism. Thaaaat’s right, ladiesan’gennlemen, the current Communist Party may be embracing capitalism like a breastfeeding baby but the spirit of the revolution is alive and well - at least for red-flag-backed holiday snaps and the opportunity for young and old alike to dress up as cadres, officials, or even as the great chairman himself (all for a bargainous Y5 a go; discounts available for group shots).
The significance of Yen’an in communist party history lies largely in its role as a headquarters for Chairman Mao and his top officials during the 1940s. The Buddhist temple on the hillside had also been converted into a printshop for communist propaganda during that period, making the area one of the must-see locations on a zealous red tourist’s itinerary. The former chairman’s home is situated amongst a cluster of cave-dwellings (known as yao dong) carved into the mountainside, each of which housed a high-up official or other party bigwig. So what did Mao do all those years, cooped-up in his cave-house during the first half of the 20th century? I wasn’t sure, so innocently asked dad, my personal fount (or should it be font?) of all China-related wisdom…
“Oh… I dunno, pick lice out of his pubic hair and smoke like a chimney I suspect.”
So much for the font (…or fount). Though it must be said that the chairman’s personal cave did seem to support dad’s theory, containing little more than a plain wooden desk, a chair and a rumpled bed littered with cigarettes arranged in a way that would’ve made Tracy Emin proud. Diagonally above Mao’s cave, a steep dirt path lead upwards to a smaller, unfurnished and unmarked cave.
“Who lived there?” dad asked two women gossiping nearby.
“Why Madame Mao of course!”
Another must-see sight near(ish) Yen’an is the Yellow River Falls. We extracted ourselves from the several-hour car-ride to be confronted by a vast yellow plain, through which something roughly the same shade of yellow gushed violently and muddily. The Yellow River is perhaps one of the most useless rivers in the world; the muddy yellow silt, which gives the river its name, makes the torrent more of a giant mud flow than a river; hardly any fish or other marine life can survive in it due to lack of oxygen, it’s too silty in some parts to sail across, and clogs up any hydro-electric dams that dare to make use of its rolling girth. But who said nature had to be useful? There’s something wild and untamed about the Yellow River - its course and size varies daily despite the various landowners, emperors, and governments’ plans to tame it. Attempts at alteration can in fact lead to disastrous consequences, with areas being silted up or flooded, or fields that rely on the nutritious silt suddenly being deprived. Close up, the falls were like great, muddy rapids foaming out of a chasm of soft yellow clay. Potholes gurgled underfoot as tourists squatted to collect the famous murky water in plastic bottles or posed, pioneer-like on a flimsy clay outcrop near the most dramatic part of the splurge. The description of a Beijing park ornament came to mind: “This is famous stone from East mountain. It strong and inarticulate. It look like spewing and grotesque fire. This is why it called as ‘flame’.” The inarticulate river of flame…
Hmm, not bad…
It seems rather unbelievable now that none of us mentioned the driving until we were well on our return journey from the falls. Maybe we just didn’t want to tempt fate, or perhaps we were afraid that saying anything, anything at all, that might distract the driver from his manic grand-prix game could lead to a messy, horrible and metal-filled death. We careered over rough mountain passes and through tunnels at G-force, overtaking on the inside, driving in the wrong lane towards oncoming traffic and, a particular favourite it seems, a combination of all of the above. At one point, just as I was trying to convince myself that it was an honour to be seen as a fit companion for our manic taxi driver’s apparent wish for truck-shaped annihilation, everything jolted violently forward, there was a burst of carhorns and… we continued on our way. Our battered little taxi had very nearly collided head-on with an articulated lorry. There were tyre marks on the road and a smell of burnt rubber in the air… Tumbling out at last at our hotel, we felt gratefully for the limbs we couldn’t believe were still attached and vowed never to take a taxi there again.
The cheery man who took us to the station the next day was even worse.
Back in Beijing, I continued my adventures on foot, often going out at night to avoid the suffocating humidity. An area between the lakes and the apartment had recently been transmogrified into a sort of red-light district/tourist trap, full of fluorescent flashing neon, loud street hawkers and seedy-looking bars guarded by equally seedy-looking men. Hurrying past one evening with my dad, aunt and a couple of friends, we were struck by a row of incongruously unassuming red lanterns that lead off down a narrow gap between two bars into uncertain darkness. A fading sign read ‘temple’, with an arrow pointing into the murk. Curious, we followed the lanterns past the backs of the bars, discarded piles of good-luck posters and small rooms filled with people snoring, eating or watching television from metal bunks. The path ended at a large red door flanked by bowls of red and black carp. Through the dusty light inside, we could see long wooden tables and benches, various paintings and shrines, and a rickety ladder leading up to the ceiling. A man appeared soundlessly out of the shadows behind the door.
“Welcome to the temple restaurant,” he said.
So it both was and wasn’t a temple, and the man both was and wasn’t a monk (I think he represented the Buddhist organisation that owned the restaurant). It was one of those bizarre businesses that seem only to be able to spring up and survive in Beijing, apparently free of publicity or even customers… Amazingly, it was also ‘by appointment only’.
Another of the many firsts I experienced on this visit was the art of haggling. Haggling is so integral to most monetary transactions in China that I’m amazed I’ve never done it before. My nice, polite western upbringing has meant that my average conversation with a shopkeeper strays little further than flurries of hellos, thankyous and the odd apology. Occasionally I am daring (or in Scotland) and find myself going into howareyoudoings or earnest debate about the weather (excepting the times I consciously try to make things more interesting by exclaiming ‘happy Wednesday!’ in an over-boisterous manner or try to conduct surveys on what colour day the shopkeeper is having…) but I digress. So, haggling. Through my adventures, I have identified three typical types of Beijing shopkeeper:
1) Ms Niceperson - this type of shopkeeper is often young and chirpy and the most pleasant to haggle with, since all money-talk would be neatly disguised in sympathetic conversation about students and how little money they have but look what lovely quality this jacket is… All is smiles and thankyous and pleasecomeagains. I leave feeling slightly fleeced but having gained a friend.
2) Sometimes Ms Niceperson - similar to the previous, this type of shopkeeper is lovely and friendly as long as no talk of money is involved. She will smile and coo and fuss at you and your prospective purchases but as soon as the talk turns to price, everything changes - the friendly smile vanishes, eyes blaze and I apologise and back off into the corner. Common phrases may include “WHAT? You want HOW MUCH for that? [very loudly]” and “how could you! I have a family and young children to care for. Are you trying to take food out of my babies’ mouths??” Of course once the deal is done, no matter if it’s a quarter or even a fifth of the asking price, all is smiles and happiness again. Your purchase will be wrapped, fussed over, and you will be invited to comeagainanytime. I leave these stalls feeling shaken, victorious, but a little guilty about whether I’ve really deprived a toddler of their next meal.
3) No more Ms Niceperson. Ever - Finally we come to the scariest dragons of the Beijing shopping scene, often stony-faced old women with set, determined expressions and their hair tied back in a tight bun. Theirs is a strict let-the-duffers-come-too-you policy, waiting till the nervous customer has asked the price of something for a second or even third time before looking up from their magazines or endless red knitting. Once the haggling begins, it is high volume and to me, completely terrifying. “WHAT DO YOU TAKE ME FOR? AN IDIOT??” she’d shout to me and the market in general, “DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND THE VALUE OF THINGS? DON’T YOU REALISE THAT THINGS HAVE TO BE BOUGHT??” Nervous requests for small reductions are treated with contempt, leading inevitably to a rebuke along the lines of “I can’t believe you! What’s in a few Yen, huh?? Where did such a cheapskate crawl from?!” This would generally continue until I have left the stall, feeling utterly ashamed, robbed, drained and, whatever the final deal, so, so relieved.
But what I increasingly began to learn was that it was all an act; a clever, intricate game played between shopkeeper and client, more real than monopoly, more visceral than charades and more subtle than cheat… they didn’t really hate me (though I suspect some of those in group three gave up liking people long ago), it was just part of an arsenal of tactics, from cajoling to threats and blackmail, to get the highest price they could. What was more, I could do the same…
(I said I could. I just need to get past my thing about being shouted at and accused of stealing food from little children…)
One of my great tutors in this new art was Li Wen Jun, a feisty, lively 16-year-old whose mother used to run a noodle bar dad and I frequented until it was rather savagely knocked down by the authorities for being ‘unauthentic’. Unlike so many Chinese kids (particularly the ones my grandparents vet and select to ‘be my little Beijing buddies’), Li Wen Jun takes a relatively relaxed attitude to the mountains of exams and assessment they are subject to, and as a result seems far more lively, imaginative and… normal than most other Chinese kids I’ve met. She is also completely uninhibited about what she says in front of her (very gentle and lovely) parents, telling me, my dad, and anyone else who cared to listen about how this friend had just lost her virginity or how that American boy wanted her to teach him to swear in Chinese but wouldn’t teach her back.
One day, when she was taking me to a local market to get a new bag, she confided proudly that she knew a swearword in English.
“It’s really bad,” she said, giggling.
“Oh yeah?” I teased, “Go on then.”
She paused for effect, and then…
“Shirt!”
It was sometime before I was calm enough to explain that in the UK, buttoned men’s apparel is rarely taken as an insult.
Apart from some of the earthier aspects of the Beijing dialect, Li Wen Jun also taught me a lot of things about Beijing, showing me around the backstreets and alleyways and introducing me to the people who lived there. The explanations were delivered in a rapid Beijingese, much of which was completely lost on me, though she seemed to enjoy my perpetual confusion and would usually explain patiently until I got the point.
So it was with a newfound confidence that I returned to my grandparent’s flat for the last time before my flight back to London. I told them about my new friends and adventures and about the purchases I’d fought for and they seemed proud - even my grandfather, who speaks so little most of the time, mentioned how I was speaking Chinese more fluently now, without the nervous stutter I had when I arrived. It occurred to me that for all these years, I never knew what they did for a living. How could I not know? So they were Party members, yes, but what were their roles? With my newfound confidence in the language, I decided to try and find out.
First I tried my grandfather.
“Grandfather, what did you do… you know, when you were working?”
He seemed surprised but pleased at my sudden interest and, taking a sip of his medicine from a chipped porcelain cup, began explaining all about how he had to file complaints and appeals for government records.
“What kind of complaints?”
He thought about this a while before answering. “Well… like housing and construction. Here’s an example: the government knocks down houses belonging to Mr Li and Mr Wang. Mr Li gets… say Y5,000 but Mr Wang only gets Y4,000, well he’s going to complain, isn’t he?”
“Then what happens?” I ask.
“Well, I file the complaint under the right date and time and update the records that a Mr Wang has made such-and-such…”
“No, but what happens to Mr Wang? Does he get the extra Y1,000?”
“No…” said grandfather, rather matter-of-factly, “the government explains to him why he doesn’t deserve the money - maybe the prices have gone down, or his property isn’t as valuable …” I ask if anyone succeeds in their appeals. “Yeees… once in a while it’s… the planners who’ve made the mistake…” he sounded doubtful.
If grandfather was reluctant to elaborate, my grandmother was even more vague about the nature of her work.
“What did you do when you were mummy’s age, grandmother?”
“Why, what a question to ask! I worked in the government - you know that.”
“But what did you do?”
“Oh you know, took orders from above, made sure they were carried out below… made notes, answered the telephone, that kind of thing.”
“What kind of orders?” I asked, beginning to feel a little like a journalist from the Today programme.
“Government orders. Lots and lots of governmental matters… Now, I want to know if you’re eating properly at university. Are you eating fresh fruit and vegetables five times a day? You must have broccoli at least twice a week, you know. I just read in the newspaper the other day…”
And she was off, telling me about the many properties of papaya and the effect not enough carrots can have on frontal-lobe development. Back in London, I related these conversations to my mum, who was unsurprised - even she doesn’t quite know what they were up to for some of those years, and she’s their daughter! It seems that those sworn to secrecy by the Party decades back are reluctant to speak of it even now, eve n to their innocently curious daughters and granddaughters.
And so, after already extending my visit by nearly a fortnight, it was time to leave Beijing, and for the first time in as long as I can remember, I didn’t want to go. There was still so much to do and see, so many people I’d gotten to know and places I wanted to explore. My Chinese also felt like it was gushing back; I was understanding more, speaking more - I was even beginning to read again… I boarded the familiar CA937 flight to London on one of the first cool, clear days of the year, with a sense of summer slipping away like the city below. The tinny music playing in the background seemed familiar…ohno! It was Mice Love Rice! At 30,000ft!! I plugged Belle and Sebastian deep into my ears and resisted the urge to press the passenger alarm or cry helplessly in the foetal position.
‘I can leave China,’ I thought as the song tinkled on towards its ohsocheesy crescendo, ‘but China will never leave me…’
“I love you, I love you, just like mice love rice…”
The song plays itself to me, maddeningly on loop in my head, to this day.
I don’t feel any different though.
In fact, it reminds me a little of a question I frequently get asked on visits to China: “so, you’re half English, born and brought-up in the UK and now go to university in Edinburgh… are you used to the foreigners yet?”
And so, dear foreigners (and non-foreigners), I bring to you this latest instalment of my travelling adventures…
*This is quite a long one, I’m afraid… but it's still shorter than the first draft I subjected my parents to... Lucky you.
Enjoy :)
Love,
Sonny
xxx
Mice Love Rice
1st - 23rd August 2006
‘What blood type are you?’
It was nearing midnight in the murky Beijing hutong and mosquitoes buzzed in the pale lamplight under which the two men and I were squatting. For a chat-up line, I’d give it full marks for originality - if it wasn’t for the fact that it came from someone I was just respectfully wondering whether to call ‘uncle’ or ‘grandfather’ - that and the fact that he was attempting to manhandle my thigh like something he’d buy at the local market.
‘Leave the girl alone!’ said the other man, definitely a ‘grandfather’, as he lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of his first and spat energetically into a pile of bricks further along the street,
‘You’ve got to excuse us night-cats,’ he said, taking a fresh puff of tobacco, ‘staying out and killing time is what we do all summer - that and sleeping during the day...’ he yawned lazily and swatted a mosquito on his bare stomach, ‘mind you, it’s been a lot more interesting since the builders moved in…’
This is nocturnal Beijing, a city that I’ve gotten to know and love over the last three weeks, full of late-opening cafes, bars and odd shops, busy streets buzzing with neon lights and red lanterns, traders’ tricycles and street stalls, elderly couples waving large fans, toddlers with open-seated trousers and squashy-faced dogs playing amongst the trees and trenches…
Trenches?
Ah yes. Amongst this night-time throng, groups of khaki-clad builders are still hard at work digging up, filling in, cementing and repaving; a continuous process of destruction and reconstruction that has been going on in Beijing for as long as many of its residents can remember. Out of these vast building sites rise a plethora of globular or angular ‘modern’ structures, as well as varying pastiches of old Beijing with her narrow streets and low-rise courtyard-houses. It is an architect’s anarchic playground, a demolition team’s nirvana and home to about 1.2billion people, three of whom are my grandparents (on my mum’s side) and my dad.
So I was back in the capital.
My previous trips to China had often been tinged with an uncertain sense of unease: my pronounced Beijing accent gave little clue to my 7-year-old’s vocabulary and inability to read or write, which often lead to confusion and long explanations, while I found the apparent inability for anyone to recognise that I am in fact my dad’s daughter (and not his tourguide or child-bride) embarrassing, to say the least. But now, two years since my last visit, the circumstances have changed. For one thing, I am living in a new area in the centre of town (dad having found a place of his own), far removed from the great, hulking tenement blocks of my grandparents’ flat which, combined with the (of course kindly and well-intentioned) protectiveness of the grandparents, always manages to revert me to the mental-age of about seven, overfed and cosseted from the outside world.
As soon as I could this time, I grabbed a map and set out into the rippling heat, exploring as much of the area surrounding dad’s new neighbourhood as the umidity (and my varying ability to get up in the morning) allowed: the lakes surrounded by tree-lined walkways, fishermen, lovers and squatting swimmers glistening like seals on its banks; the patchwork of hutongs and modern blocks, cicada-hushed streets and terrifying uncrossable six-lane highways; colourful street stalls and semi-soviet apartment stores, tiny bustling dumpling bars and pagoda-style megaliths with gilded waitresses and arctic air-conditioning.
Wow… why haven’t I seen any of this before?
Looking into a murky green lake one afternoon, I tried to ask one of the old fishermen what he could catch there.
“Nowt!” he grunted rather violently, and spat into the lake.
A young man, possibly the fisherman’s son, was swimming out towards the centre of the water, apparently with the line in his mouth. The old man directed him with jerks of his bamboo fishing rod.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” a voice from my left. The speaker was Mr Wang, a retired antiques-dealer and old-Beijinger. Now that his business days are over, he spends most of his time by the waterside, a self-confessed idler and materialist: “the fishermen’s hobby is to catch fish and put them back,” he’d say proudly over the three-hour conversation that followed, “but me - I’m even more useless. I just watch!” The materialist bit came from his trade in antiques, “my favourite antiques…? Anything that makes me money!” he exclaimed without a hint of irony, “I don’t even feel right looking at a piece, no matter how beautiful or ornate, until I know that it can earn me some real dough…” But the more I talked with Mr Wang, the more I grew to like his often-contradictory views on life. As is the way with many conversations with your elders in China, much of it centred on life-advice: “always do something you’re interested in,” he said gravely at one point, “even if it’s not the most well-paid. I really loved my antiques…” and on the subject of love and marriage (something that I was asked by a lot of Chinese people - ‘will you marry a Chinese person or a foreigner?’) I was advised to, “think practically! There’s too much of that airy-fairy romance among young people these days. You need to consider if the man can earn money, comes from a reputable family…” but also, “never forget the power of true love - I expect you’re too young to know the meaning of that yet -but life’s not just about money you know. True love is something that goes beyond material things and national boundaries. Don’t give your life away for material things…” There seemed to be something dreamily melancholic about Mr Wang when he said these things, contrasting from the former advice, which suddenly sounded recited, as if learnt from centuries of repeated cultural and parental wisdom.
And so it was, that after decrying the uselessness of the arts for making money (“what use is going to a good university to study literature? Why not business?”), Mr Wang went on to his passion for tang poetry..
Contemplation on a Moonlit Night
Before my bed the moon shines bright,
Frost-like on this starless night.
I raise my head to the lunar glow
But lower it now to thoughts of home.
and
Spring Morning
No sleep outlasts the dawn in spring;
All-over birds will chirp and sing.
Yet night-time brought the wind and rain…
How many blossoms fell today?
[by Tang poets Li Bai and Meng Haoran; my own (rather shaky) translations]
Poems that I learnt by rote in my two years at Beijing Experimental Primary School and hardly thought about since, the meanings elusive in the old-fashioned words and awkward grammar. Mr Wang explained how the poem about spring referred to a great Chinese text, The Dream of the Red Mansions - of how the story’s hero buried the blossoms in his courtyard as a symbol of the loved-ones he had lost… Straying from his so-far rather formal tone, he went on to describe the debauchery that took place in the ancient Chinese court, “you’d think from what they teach you at school that all those ancient courtiers were terribly prim and correct… not a bit of it!” he laughed, “as one famous courtesan put it, ‘the fleas and bedbugs in my mattress are cleaner than those who lie on top of it!’”
Back at dad’s apartment, I went through some of his books on Tang poetry (with translations). The language was often hard and obscure, but fascinating in a way that I’d never quite realised before. These weren’t just school exercises written exclusively for vocab-building and young-pioneer patriotism (like the parables on Mao’s heroism rescuing dying soldiers that we also had to learn). These were by real people - passions, emotions, sex… long-haired poets and eccentrics, scholars and philosophers… At the risk of sounding like something out of 1984, I began to understand how different life was before Communism, through texts rescued from a time before the Cultural Revolution came along to burn books, beat up academics and behead statues.
One of my other introductions to Chinese arts and culture came in the form of Mice Love Rice. Ohyes, this was the song in Beijing at the time of my visit, a tinkly, bunniesandrainbows-type song with some obscure storyline about a blind girl, a fat kid and a reincarnated mouse. As the song in the capital of piracy, it was, of course, everywhere. It drifted out of shops and restaurants, airports and trainstations, lifts and toilets, even my mobile, with its government-issued (!) dialtune had it on a manic loop whenever anyone tried to call. Throughout my stay in Beijing, the maddeningly catchy chorus seeped into my every pore and orifice:
“I love you, I love you, just like mice love rice!”
To get away from this squeaky, sugar-coated bit of earnoise, dad, a couple of friends and I decided to get out of Beijing for a few days to see what the rest of the country was listening to. We travelled to Yen’an, a town in Northern China famed for its cave dwellings and a key sightseeing place for the ultimate revolutionary experience: Red Tourism. Thaaaat’s right, ladiesan’gennlemen, the current Communist Party may be embracing capitalism like a breastfeeding baby but the spirit of the revolution is alive and well - at least for red-flag-backed holiday snaps and the opportunity for young and old alike to dress up as cadres, officials, or even as the great chairman himself (all for a bargainous Y5 a go; discounts available for group shots).
The significance of Yen’an in communist party history lies largely in its role as a headquarters for Chairman Mao and his top officials during the 1940s. The Buddhist temple on the hillside had also been converted into a printshop for communist propaganda during that period, making the area one of the must-see locations on a zealous red tourist’s itinerary. The former chairman’s home is situated amongst a cluster of cave-dwellings (known as yao dong) carved into the mountainside, each of which housed a high-up official or other party bigwig. So what did Mao do all those years, cooped-up in his cave-house during the first half of the 20th century? I wasn’t sure, so innocently asked dad, my personal fount (or should it be font?) of all China-related wisdom…
“Oh… I dunno, pick lice out of his pubic hair and smoke like a chimney I suspect.”
So much for the font (…or fount). Though it must be said that the chairman’s personal cave did seem to support dad’s theory, containing little more than a plain wooden desk, a chair and a rumpled bed littered with cigarettes arranged in a way that would’ve made Tracy Emin proud. Diagonally above Mao’s cave, a steep dirt path lead upwards to a smaller, unfurnished and unmarked cave.
“Who lived there?” dad asked two women gossiping nearby.
“Why Madame Mao of course!”
Another must-see sight near(ish) Yen’an is the Yellow River Falls. We extracted ourselves from the several-hour car-ride to be confronted by a vast yellow plain, through which something roughly the same shade of yellow gushed violently and muddily. The Yellow River is perhaps one of the most useless rivers in the world; the muddy yellow silt, which gives the river its name, makes the torrent more of a giant mud flow than a river; hardly any fish or other marine life can survive in it due to lack of oxygen, it’s too silty in some parts to sail across, and clogs up any hydro-electric dams that dare to make use of its rolling girth. But who said nature had to be useful? There’s something wild and untamed about the Yellow River - its course and size varies daily despite the various landowners, emperors, and governments’ plans to tame it. Attempts at alteration can in fact lead to disastrous consequences, with areas being silted up or flooded, or fields that rely on the nutritious silt suddenly being deprived. Close up, the falls were like great, muddy rapids foaming out of a chasm of soft yellow clay. Potholes gurgled underfoot as tourists squatted to collect the famous murky water in plastic bottles or posed, pioneer-like on a flimsy clay outcrop near the most dramatic part of the splurge. The description of a Beijing park ornament came to mind: “This is famous stone from East mountain. It strong and inarticulate. It look like spewing and grotesque fire. This is why it called as ‘flame’.” The inarticulate river of flame…
Hmm, not bad…
It seems rather unbelievable now that none of us mentioned the driving until we were well on our return journey from the falls. Maybe we just didn’t want to tempt fate, or perhaps we were afraid that saying anything, anything at all, that might distract the driver from his manic grand-prix game could lead to a messy, horrible and metal-filled death. We careered over rough mountain passes and through tunnels at G-force, overtaking on the inside, driving in the wrong lane towards oncoming traffic and, a particular favourite it seems, a combination of all of the above. At one point, just as I was trying to convince myself that it was an honour to be seen as a fit companion for our manic taxi driver’s apparent wish for truck-shaped annihilation, everything jolted violently forward, there was a burst of carhorns and… we continued on our way. Our battered little taxi had very nearly collided head-on with an articulated lorry. There were tyre marks on the road and a smell of burnt rubber in the air… Tumbling out at last at our hotel, we felt gratefully for the limbs we couldn’t believe were still attached and vowed never to take a taxi there again.
The cheery man who took us to the station the next day was even worse.
Back in Beijing, I continued my adventures on foot, often going out at night to avoid the suffocating humidity. An area between the lakes and the apartment had recently been transmogrified into a sort of red-light district/tourist trap, full of fluorescent flashing neon, loud street hawkers and seedy-looking bars guarded by equally seedy-looking men. Hurrying past one evening with my dad, aunt and a couple of friends, we were struck by a row of incongruously unassuming red lanterns that lead off down a narrow gap between two bars into uncertain darkness. A fading sign read ‘temple’, with an arrow pointing into the murk. Curious, we followed the lanterns past the backs of the bars, discarded piles of good-luck posters and small rooms filled with people snoring, eating or watching television from metal bunks. The path ended at a large red door flanked by bowls of red and black carp. Through the dusty light inside, we could see long wooden tables and benches, various paintings and shrines, and a rickety ladder leading up to the ceiling. A man appeared soundlessly out of the shadows behind the door.
“Welcome to the temple restaurant,” he said.
So it both was and wasn’t a temple, and the man both was and wasn’t a monk (I think he represented the Buddhist organisation that owned the restaurant). It was one of those bizarre businesses that seem only to be able to spring up and survive in Beijing, apparently free of publicity or even customers… Amazingly, it was also ‘by appointment only’.
Another of the many firsts I experienced on this visit was the art of haggling. Haggling is so integral to most monetary transactions in China that I’m amazed I’ve never done it before. My nice, polite western upbringing has meant that my average conversation with a shopkeeper strays little further than flurries of hellos, thankyous and the odd apology. Occasionally I am daring (or in Scotland) and find myself going into howareyoudoings or earnest debate about the weather (excepting the times I consciously try to make things more interesting by exclaiming ‘happy Wednesday!’ in an over-boisterous manner or try to conduct surveys on what colour day the shopkeeper is having…) but I digress. So, haggling. Through my adventures, I have identified three typical types of Beijing shopkeeper:
1) Ms Niceperson - this type of shopkeeper is often young and chirpy and the most pleasant to haggle with, since all money-talk would be neatly disguised in sympathetic conversation about students and how little money they have but look what lovely quality this jacket is… All is smiles and thankyous and pleasecomeagains. I leave feeling slightly fleeced but having gained a friend.
2) Sometimes Ms Niceperson - similar to the previous, this type of shopkeeper is lovely and friendly as long as no talk of money is involved. She will smile and coo and fuss at you and your prospective purchases but as soon as the talk turns to price, everything changes - the friendly smile vanishes, eyes blaze and I apologise and back off into the corner. Common phrases may include “WHAT? You want HOW MUCH for that? [very loudly]” and “how could you! I have a family and young children to care for. Are you trying to take food out of my babies’ mouths??” Of course once the deal is done, no matter if it’s a quarter or even a fifth of the asking price, all is smiles and happiness again. Your purchase will be wrapped, fussed over, and you will be invited to comeagainanytime. I leave these stalls feeling shaken, victorious, but a little guilty about whether I’ve really deprived a toddler of their next meal.
3) No more Ms Niceperson. Ever - Finally we come to the scariest dragons of the Beijing shopping scene, often stony-faced old women with set, determined expressions and their hair tied back in a tight bun. Theirs is a strict let-the-duffers-come-too-you policy, waiting till the nervous customer has asked the price of something for a second or even third time before looking up from their magazines or endless red knitting. Once the haggling begins, it is high volume and to me, completely terrifying. “WHAT DO YOU TAKE ME FOR? AN IDIOT??” she’d shout to me and the market in general, “DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND THE VALUE OF THINGS? DON’T YOU REALISE THAT THINGS HAVE TO BE BOUGHT??” Nervous requests for small reductions are treated with contempt, leading inevitably to a rebuke along the lines of “I can’t believe you! What’s in a few Yen, huh?? Where did such a cheapskate crawl from?!” This would generally continue until I have left the stall, feeling utterly ashamed, robbed, drained and, whatever the final deal, so, so relieved.
But what I increasingly began to learn was that it was all an act; a clever, intricate game played between shopkeeper and client, more real than monopoly, more visceral than charades and more subtle than cheat… they didn’t really hate me (though I suspect some of those in group three gave up liking people long ago), it was just part of an arsenal of tactics, from cajoling to threats and blackmail, to get the highest price they could. What was more, I could do the same…
(I said I could. I just need to get past my thing about being shouted at and accused of stealing food from little children…)
One of my great tutors in this new art was Li Wen Jun, a feisty, lively 16-year-old whose mother used to run a noodle bar dad and I frequented until it was rather savagely knocked down by the authorities for being ‘unauthentic’. Unlike so many Chinese kids (particularly the ones my grandparents vet and select to ‘be my little Beijing buddies’), Li Wen Jun takes a relatively relaxed attitude to the mountains of exams and assessment they are subject to, and as a result seems far more lively, imaginative and… normal than most other Chinese kids I’ve met. She is also completely uninhibited about what she says in front of her (very gentle and lovely) parents, telling me, my dad, and anyone else who cared to listen about how this friend had just lost her virginity or how that American boy wanted her to teach him to swear in Chinese but wouldn’t teach her back.
One day, when she was taking me to a local market to get a new bag, she confided proudly that she knew a swearword in English.
“It’s really bad,” she said, giggling.
“Oh yeah?” I teased, “Go on then.”
She paused for effect, and then…
“Shirt!”
It was sometime before I was calm enough to explain that in the UK, buttoned men’s apparel is rarely taken as an insult.
Apart from some of the earthier aspects of the Beijing dialect, Li Wen Jun also taught me a lot of things about Beijing, showing me around the backstreets and alleyways and introducing me to the people who lived there. The explanations were delivered in a rapid Beijingese, much of which was completely lost on me, though she seemed to enjoy my perpetual confusion and would usually explain patiently until I got the point.
So it was with a newfound confidence that I returned to my grandparent’s flat for the last time before my flight back to London. I told them about my new friends and adventures and about the purchases I’d fought for and they seemed proud - even my grandfather, who speaks so little most of the time, mentioned how I was speaking Chinese more fluently now, without the nervous stutter I had when I arrived. It occurred to me that for all these years, I never knew what they did for a living. How could I not know? So they were Party members, yes, but what were their roles? With my newfound confidence in the language, I decided to try and find out.
First I tried my grandfather.
“Grandfather, what did you do… you know, when you were working?”
He seemed surprised but pleased at my sudden interest and, taking a sip of his medicine from a chipped porcelain cup, began explaining all about how he had to file complaints and appeals for government records.
“What kind of complaints?”
He thought about this a while before answering. “Well… like housing and construction. Here’s an example: the government knocks down houses belonging to Mr Li and Mr Wang. Mr Li gets… say Y5,000 but Mr Wang only gets Y4,000, well he’s going to complain, isn’t he?”
“Then what happens?” I ask.
“Well, I file the complaint under the right date and time and update the records that a Mr Wang has made such-and-such…”
“No, but what happens to Mr Wang? Does he get the extra Y1,000?”
“No…” said grandfather, rather matter-of-factly, “the government explains to him why he doesn’t deserve the money - maybe the prices have gone down, or his property isn’t as valuable …” I ask if anyone succeeds in their appeals. “Yeees… once in a while it’s… the planners who’ve made the mistake…” he sounded doubtful.
If grandfather was reluctant to elaborate, my grandmother was even more vague about the nature of her work.
“What did you do when you were mummy’s age, grandmother?”
“Why, what a question to ask! I worked in the government - you know that.”
“But what did you do?”
“Oh you know, took orders from above, made sure they were carried out below… made notes, answered the telephone, that kind of thing.”
“What kind of orders?” I asked, beginning to feel a little like a journalist from the Today programme.
“Government orders. Lots and lots of governmental matters… Now, I want to know if you’re eating properly at university. Are you eating fresh fruit and vegetables five times a day? You must have broccoli at least twice a week, you know. I just read in the newspaper the other day…”
And she was off, telling me about the many properties of papaya and the effect not enough carrots can have on frontal-lobe development. Back in London, I related these conversations to my mum, who was unsurprised - even she doesn’t quite know what they were up to for some of those years, and she’s their daughter! It seems that those sworn to secrecy by the Party decades back are reluctant to speak of it even now, eve n to their innocently curious daughters and granddaughters.
And so, after already extending my visit by nearly a fortnight, it was time to leave Beijing, and for the first time in as long as I can remember, I didn’t want to go. There was still so much to do and see, so many people I’d gotten to know and places I wanted to explore. My Chinese also felt like it was gushing back; I was understanding more, speaking more - I was even beginning to read again… I boarded the familiar CA937 flight to London on one of the first cool, clear days of the year, with a sense of summer slipping away like the city below. The tinny music playing in the background seemed familiar…ohno! It was Mice Love Rice! At 30,000ft!! I plugged Belle and Sebastian deep into my ears and resisted the urge to press the passenger alarm or cry helplessly in the foetal position.
‘I can leave China,’ I thought as the song tinkled on towards its ohsocheesy crescendo, ‘but China will never leave me…’
“I love you, I love you, just like mice love rice…”
The song plays itself to me, maddeningly on loop in my head, to this day.