Scratching the Surface
Fiona Kamal
©
Copyright 2021 by Fiona Kamal
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Niamh
and I are both gazing abstractedly at the postcard scene before us,
where red-fringed rickshaws buzz like flies around laughing,
visor-shaded tourists, and the odd delivery van snails-paces it
across crowded flagstones, driver dangling an ash-loaded cigarette
patiently out of a wound-down window.
It
is only ten in the morning, but already the sun is searing the back
of my neck above my t-shirt, and the air is beginning to acquire the
tang of dust and suffocation it will carry in the full heat of noon.
The lake shines like pewter, little motor boats rippling its surface.
Small children take turns at the tillers under the indulgent gazes of
parents and camera-phones, their elated shrieks carrying across the
water. The light makes everything unnaturally vivid, like an old,
technicolour movie from the ’50’s. I almost expect
Deborah Kerr to appear twisting a parasol, which, at this point, I am
ready to forcibly wrest from her feminine grasp. The patch of shade
from the single plane tree behind us is pitifully small, and
shrinking by the moment. We are politely taking turns to stand in its
relative cool.
“We
can go there for lunch later,” Niamh
says, nodding at the shi-shi two-storey restaurant across the narrow
street, where the aroma of fried jiaozi is already wafting on the
air, along with the bell-like chime of canned Chinese music. I agree
enthusiastically, though we both know that this is a function of
polite optimism - when lunchtime rolls around we will be too busy
filming improvised dance routines to take a break. We are standing
in a prime spot next to the Silver Ingot Bridge, where Houhai Lake
gives into Qian Hai. A stone’s throw away is the iconic Drum
Tower with its Disney dream of Chinese architecture - tiled grey
roofing with jaunty upswings at the corners like a layer-cake of Dali
moustaches, topping the imperial red and gold of its upper floor. For
most of today we will watch assorted groups of our chimeric
students entertain bemused locals with clumsy, enthusiastic K-pop
moves as part of the school’s attempt to “enrich”
their education. Their mission is to complete a set of “creative
challenges” against the TripAdvisor-perfect backdrop of Houhai
with its dusty hutongs and traditional craft stalls.
Chinese
by birth but international by dint of their parents’ ambitions,
their expensive education and their addiction to social media, the
kids in our school have been fated from birth to go far. Our
kindergarten teachers are cajoled by anxious mothers to have their
toddlers read faster, more fluently, to calculate before they can
dress themselves. From the age of four they have been headed for the
Ivy League or Oxbridge. It is a commonplace amongst the teaching
staff that most of them are fully bilingual before they’re
potty trained. Niamh
and I have been on this trip each year for half a decade and both our
thoughts are wandering in the same direction now, this final trip
before we both leave China for good. We are both thinking that we
have no idea what China actually looks like.
We
know, by now, that it certainly doesn’t look like the carefully
curated scene before us. The Beijing authority has torn up most of
the traditional hutongs in the rest of the city, replacing them with
shiny shopping malls and grid-planned apartment buildings, moving
their residents out to the edges, to custom-made dwellings they could
not usually dream of owning. The picturesque roofs before us, with
their cylindrical clay tiles that channel both the rain and the
Beijing heat down into the alleyways are nearly impossible to
maintain now - few of the skilled craftsmen with the know-how are
left. Walking from the bus this morning, down pungent dusty side
streets where laundry was strung from wooden-shuttered windows, we
passed an old lady sitting on a white plastic stool, in the sun. She
nodded at our noisy, gaudy-hued crocodile of school children with the
unsurprised expression of one who must have lived through Japanese
invasion, civil war and the Cultural Revolution, and now sat at the
end of a street where neon bar signs had sprung up, heralding the
incursion of drunken westerners. What would she have said was the
real, authentic China? Somethings half-remembered from her childhood,
another fabricated half-truth?
My
first year on the Houhai trip I was entranced. I fell for it all -
the brightly coloured nick-nack shops selling fans and cheomsangs,
street sellers hawking sugary bintanghulu, the imposing hauteur of
the Drum and Bell towers that presided over it all with prefectural
propriety. I brought the family here to experience “traditional
Chinese culture”, the same summer I took them to see the
Chinese state circus. It took me a while to see the performative
spell casting, the acrobatic juggling of appearances, in both. Gorgeous
silken colours and delicate embroidery of surfaces that
obscure the hard grafting for survival, the desperate focus it takes
to balance individual prosperity - cold, hard cash - with lip service
to the idea of community and culture.
If
you squint hard enough you can just glimpse them, the daily lives of
“ordinary” Chinese people. They don’t appear much
in my enchanted little bubble, the school community with its pampered
western teachers and well-heeled parents who are more at home in an
international departures lounge than any particular city or country.
There are the drivers, who ferry us safely about the city to the
restaurants and clothes shops that cost several multiples of an
average citizen’s monthly wage to frequent, but they make only
polite, pre-rehearsed small talk from a script gleaned of language
tapes listened to in the lull between jobs. There’s my ayi, who
laughs and acquiesces to my children’s increasingly spoilt
demands, tutting at the profusion of their clothes she has to
launder, and shaking her head when we drink cold water in hot
weather. Between us, she and I pantomime questions and instructions,
circumnavigating the desert of our linguistic division, but our
shared pool of around fifty words doesn’t stretch to me seeing
much of her life outside our flat.
Occasionally,
at the doctor’s or ballet school I meet a mother whose social
class is more like mine would be at home, and if the wait is long
enough we might exchange a few knowing smiles, a word or two about
our children’s ailments and their antics, and for a moment I
feel perhaps as though there is a real life here that goes on beneath
the faux-gold glimmer of the moneyed class, and above the
dirt-market, desperate scrabble of the un-moneyed one. A place I
might really live, if I really lived here. But I have come to see,
by now, that I don’t, really, and I never will. I am simply on
a very long tourist visa, one that allows me the illusion of being a
local, for a while.
A
few weeks from now I will have packed up our lives here into two
large shipping containers and sent them off across the ocean. We
will leave behind the pretence that we ever really lived in this
city, and it will fade, in time, to the memory of an extended
holiday. We will join the ranks of my students, who don’t
really know where they’re from, only where they are headed to.
In Vancouver, ironically, I will know more Chinese-born people as
friends than I have in five years in Beijing.
The
first group of students arrives. They tear open the envelope with
their task inside it, giggle and shriek as they choreograph a clunky
ensemble routine. The logos on their shirts are western, their
accents from somewhere indeterminate on a flight path to New York. At
the end of their dance they freeze-frame, making bunny ears and
Korean crossed-finger heart shapes while we snap them for the group
chat. They shamble off to their next challenge, chattering in a mix
of Chinglish and Korean, scattered with American slang to make them
sound cool.
They
are headed somewhere as strange and familiar to them as it is to me. I
follow them with my gaze, as they saunter past the opaque waters of
Houhai Lake, its silted depths hidden beneath a reflection of
cloudless blue sky.
I have
just begun writing in earnest after meaning to get around to it for
thirty years. It’s not that I didn’t do anything in that
time. I spent a lot of it in university libraries studying English
Literature, and then a lot of it in classrooms teaching English
Language and Literature. I have done so very, very much laundry, some
shopping, and a fair bit of cooking. There have been holidays, back
in the days when one could do that. I lived in Beijing, China, for 5
years where I taught English at an International School, and those
experiences formed the basis of this piece. I have three
daughters who love reading and a husband who doesn’t. I’ll
read anything I can get my hands on, from cereal packets to Joyce.
Hopefully, dear reader, as I believe one says in these circumstances,
you are as voracious and indiscriminating as I am, and will find my
piece on HouHai Lake, Beijing at least mildly more interesting than
breakfast food packaging.
(Unless
you
type
the
author's name
in
the subject
line
of the message
we
won't know where to send it.)
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