Horrifying Pretension
The following was my first attempt to transform wildly disparate, invigorating first impressions into something coldly formal and journalistic.
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Somewhere on the way up to Cairns I met an eternal backpacker, an Irishman who had lived out of a bag over 4 decades and across the span of every continent. He had briefly taught in China, but told me little that was insightful, aside from the most popular joke in China, and suggested it to me as an ice-breaker for my upcoming classes. How many steps does it take to put an elephant in the fridge?
1. Open the door.
2. Put the elephant in.
3. Close the door.
How many steps does it take to put a giraffe in a fridge?
1. Open the door.
2. Remove the elephant.
3. Put the giraffe in.
4. Close the door.
Although the British media was constantly informing me that all kinds of social, political (I refuse to use the term socio-political) and economic (the same with socio-economic) barriers were falling, apparently China was still locked in the tyrannical grip of end-of-the-pier music hall humour.
Glimpsing a city from your aerial descent gives you a realised impression that supersedes the three or four hackneyed sentences in your guidebook, which I was clutching tight with curled white knuckles. As the flight is given permission to land, you abruptly break from the languorous amble and descend below the cloud, tilt across your neighbour’s seat and just stare. LA, a patchwork of inexorable electric grids and snaking beams of traffic, hazed by a thin patina of smog. Christchurch, a timid expanse of single-stories hemmed by the Port Hills and the coast, straggling towards the stretch of the Canterbury plains. Melbourne, replicated monopoly-style suburbia converging on a central high rise mass. However, Chengdu did not afford me any such overview until the cloud dissipated slightly to reveal runways and maintenance roads, scattered blocks of sheds, and patchy wasteland, the typical surrounds of airports. Chengdu was still a figment of my Lonely Planet.
I opened my Mandarin phrasebook for the first time on the flight to Chengdu, but I’d already learnt my first Chinese words before the snap of the resistant paper leaves against their stringent binding. Lau wai, I realised, was being used in hushed reference to me, and it still trails me now, persistent and faint with adults, boldly direct with children, unaware of its growing taboo status in China’s growing western drive. It literally means old outsider. Perhaps the easiest way to embarrass a Chinese person is to feign general ignorance, and as soon as lau wai is mentioned in a discussion regarding you, wave vigorously towards them. I sat as the only lau wai in the departure lounge for Chengdu. As is the norm, instructions to board were delivered first in English, then in the secondary language associated with the destination, but I was the only passenger to shift in response to the first set, while the bustle of the remaining couple hundred passengers were prompted by the secondary set. I sat unaccompanied in my row, and the feeling of isolation, novel and stimulating at its earliest point, was further increased by the stewardess handing out Chinese newspapers left and right down the aisle, stopping her arm short as she glanced at me giggling.
The entertainment portion of the flight followed the distribution of papers and the first round of drinks. As screens flickered above every eighth row, I curiously awaited the programming and my first cultural experience of modern China. A darkened, sombre street. A portentous pause. Then a striking spotlight. The tumble of a body into the light. A Chinese take on a murder mystery, or Beckettean amateur dramatics? No. Mr Bean. The whole cabin responded en masse to each pratfall, until the final sketch where Mr Bean attempts to recover his misplaced trousers from the occupant of a toilet cubicle, at which point the guy across the aisle withdrew from the in-flight meal and rumbled and spluttered. Mr Bean was followed by an oriental Opportunity Knocks, where groups of people choreograph themselves to form various objects from pendulum clocks to ice-creams and dinosaurs, then rush to the front of the stage and dance in an Austin Powers style while the audience cheer drives the level of the meter to the top. Hmm.
I left the baggage reclaim into the hall of the airport proper, and was instantly surrounded by a pack, or whatever the collective noun is for taxi drivers. Numbers were tapped on keypads and prospective figures presented to me on the screens of mobile phones. Although I could not hope to barter and match the taxi price that the Lonely Planet, in its invariably conceited presumption of cultural savvy, suggested, I still recognised that the prices being shown to me were excessive. Instead, I hunted for the bus to the city. I tried asking in English at various information sites, but was met with nonplussed headshakes or laughter. The same reaction followed when I tried plucking a phrase from my pocketbook. It reminded me of the complacent, concerned smiles that I offered to English language students in Jersey when they admitted how difficult it was to be confident when speaking an alien language in a foreign culture. To risk sounding like the trite lessons learned summation of an after-school special, I could now empathise with this sense of dislocation. I chanced upon someone who could finally decipher my question, and boarded the bus to the city, where I had the luck to sit next to an intrigued businessman who offered me my first lesson in functional street Chinese, tai gui la! (translated as much too expensive!) delivered in a suitably melodramatic vein.
I stayed at a backpackers in my first week, although a Chinese backpackers is unrecognisable from an Australian one, least of all for having a military guard at the front gate. My encounters with various travellers, ex-pat residents and various information sites filled in some gaps. The cloud cover. It didn’t abate in the first week. The Sichuan plains on which Chengdu sprawls is criss-crossed by over 80 rivers. The tributaries of the two major systems, Minjiang and Tuojiang, meet in Chengdu. The inevitable moistness is compounded further by the mountain ranges that border Chengdu and the surrounding plains, most notably the Tibet-Qinghai plateau to the west. Chengdu is a wet city in a vast basin. The pavements never dry, streaked by grimy trails from bicycles, and pocked with sullen muddy pools wherever the tiles crack and lose their consistency, which is fairly common on streets that support over eleven million feet.
The city, way out west towards the autonomous regions of China and bordered on all sides, has tended to the peripheral in the course of Chinese history. Only in the nineteen fifties was it connected to the eastern and southern seaboard states by rail. Indeed, it has often been the base, or in worst-case situations, the sanctuary for rebellious minorities. Accordingly, it lags behind Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing in terms of capitalist development, but this is a feature that many of the ex-pats embrace.
My first encounter with fellow lau wai occurred on my second night. Leaving my centrally situated backpackers, I followed the Nan He branch of the Jin Jiang river east until it met Renmin Nanlu (People’s South Road), a wide boulevard lined with lofted pines. I followed it further south, passing several Chinese bars, a large-scale technological precinct garnered with a metallic cut-away of the straggling network of the human brain, a football stadium complete with retractable roof, a Jamaican themed bar, nightclub, Indian restaurant and ultimately, and logically I suppose, The Shamrock, Chengdu’s Irish bar. The Irish bar is in the vanguard of civilisation, and I don’t suppose Chengdu would be regarded as such without a Leprechaun or Scruffys or the like. The majority of the paying customers were fellow English-language teachers, and introduced me to the fact that I was the only sane one, a select band that I will magnanimously enlarge to two when including my fellow crapaud John Oxley up in sub-zero Shenyang. A bespectacled outwardly respectable middle-aged Englishman, after a handful of Chinese beers, abruptly abandoned his earlier stream of introductory chit-chat, took exception to the fact that I was glancing at a football match on the big screen, and asked me, word for word, If I considered sport to be more important than human suffering in the world. I was understandably taken aback, considering that I had not expressed any kind of political opinion in the preceding four months much less four hours. I couldn’t quite fathom the logical leap he had made, especially considering that the mention of human suffering in the first weeks of February would still have been linked to the Tsunami, a subject which had not been raised at any point in the evening. I tried to pacify him, but the incessant tirade only stopped when he approached a young Chinese woman sitting at the bar and started advancing upon her. Maybe this place does something to you. I would find out.
I had spent the previous 4 weeks in tropical Queensland, so the sub-zero snowy temperatures of Chengdu were jarring, evinced by sullen blue patches of frostbite. I had to buy a coat and fast, and following my first meeting with my organisation’s director of teaching, she immediately took it upon herself to take me out shopping unquestionably, as is the wont of small Chinese women of a certain age. We tried a strip of clothing stores near the company’s offices. The routine was repeated successively. She would stride in, patter a few no-nonsense lines of Mandarin, point back towards me as I lumbered through the entrance, raise both her arms laterally to the shoulder, bend them in, and shrug, and point again to reinforce her point. I think the charade would loosely translate as can you find a coat for the white gorilla. The assistants would either giggle, rummage for the biggest coat and toss it in my direction, or look aghast as if they had been asked to fit an elephant in a fridge. Not one shop on the strip had anything approaching comfortable. We caught a bus to the city’s central commercial district where again she led me in and out of a range of clothing stores. I acquired a travelling audience this time, resulting from the area’s popularity, principally constituted of small pointing children exclaiming lao wai! Consider that my Head of Teaching does not trouble 5ft. Following each rejection, I began furtively glancing for hidden cameras, feeling very Truman like. The show would be a big ratings winner in China I would suspect, along the lines of slapstick 70’s BBC comedy a la Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Em. I did find a coat, at the very last shop, an Umbro product, of course a western brand. Grim satisfaction.
Plenty of suggestive metaphorical ideas for an English Lit graduate to take from such a harmless anecdote and apply to China as a whole; but I reckon China has had enough of its 1.3 billion ethnically and culturally diverse population being cramped within a stiff, constrictive pigeon-hole. Actually to sound entirely pretentious I could suggest it would be like putting an elephant in a fridge and in so doing would unify the content of this ragged piece and imbue a joking aside with some kind of stoic universal significance. Having read that, it seems like John Oxley just became a select band of one.