Categories
Recent Entries
Archives

February 08, 2004

Hi there, I'm Steven Spielberg

Into China on a bunkbed

Trying to buy a train ticket in Shenzen station is an experience that cannot but change you as a person. Crossing the border into mainland China, the English language slips away like a barely remembered dream.

Over and over, people had been telling me: travelling in China without a Mandarin phrasebook is a nightmare and train and bus stations are China at its most chaotic and agressive. Being interested in the challenge and being too lazy to have searched a phrasebook down, I came to be standing in a long queue of people with only the Chinese symbols of my destination written down for me on a scrap of paper. The air felt compressed with frustration and pushyness. In China, it seems one buys a train ticket by shouting as forcefully as one can at the ticket selling official - if you can impress her she lets you travel. This was probably the most alien place I have ever encountered - there was not even a common alphabet for us to communicate through - and the air was clogged with the tension of a hundred people trying to get wherever they felt they needed to go. It occurred to me with the clarity of prophecy that I wasn't going to be successful at buying a ticket here, but also that I didn't especially mind, which was a very empowering feeling. The point of doing something like this was the uniqueness of the experience - why dilute it with knowledge?

I found myself at the front of the queue, facing the attendant. I showed my scrap to her, she frowned at it, and waved me away in irritation. It seemed there wasn't a train going there, and she had no interest in working out a solution for me. The three people behind me jumped forward, so in seconds I had been pushed out of contention for a ticket. Hmmm.

I set about finding the bus station, which was supposed to be nearby. I walked one way, then another, knees beginning to ache from carrying my rucksack. I found a helpful woman who wrote down the symbols for the bus I needed, but I still didn't know where the bus station might be. Walking and walking, different people gave me different but equally vague directions, eventually I implicitly just admitted defeat by allowing a taxi driver type person to walk me to there. I booked a ticket, the overnight bus for Yangshao left in four hours. It was luxurious: no seats, only three rows of bunk beds. It was nearly empty, I got talking to an Australian named Tim and a Chinese girl on holiday called Kathy. The three of us have been sharing a room together, which has been a lot of fun. Tim is a very mature and dryly funny seventeen year old, Kathy is a twenty three year old travel agent from Shenzen, taking a holiday by her herself for the first time.


Pretty girls and hot coffee

Yangshao, my first destination in mainland China, is a strange town, but I suspect it is in fact a dilution of the total strangeness of China. It is a town among beautiful scenery, but the penetrating cold has pushed exploring largely off the agenda for lazy me. There is a tourist centre with a whole street of cafes offering home comforts for backpackers, the aptly named West Street. But there aren't that many Westerners here, and as a result there isn't much backpacker atmosphere. The foreigners who here are mostly male solo travellers, perhaps a little more rugged and independent than the usual bunch, as I suspect this town and this country isn't really on the Asian backpacking circuit. In contrast, the cafes on West street are usually run by a cadre of Chinese women in their twenties, who usually speak good English. One is quickly made to feel like an old friend - it is kind of funny to watch these pretty girls coo over us, chat for an hour with any visitor who comes in - as we leave they remind us to come back for lunch.

The town is also perhaps ironically a big centre of English schools. I meet a group of young Chinese friends who have come here on holiday - as Yangshao is famous as a place to practice your English by talking to all the foreigners. The idea of teaching English for a month or so starts to really appeal to me - an opportunity to stay in one place for a while, get to know some Chinese people well and to even add to my bank account. A wannabe English teacher with no qualifications beyond a university degree and being born in an English speaking country earns around three thousand yuan a month and free accomodation. A frugal person could live very cheaply in China - it is fifteen yuan to the pound (so three thousand yuan is about two hundred quid), and a big bowl of beef noodles in a street stall for lunch costs a mighty two yuan (so circa fifteen pence).

I actually got a few job offers in Yangshao, and ended up giving two trial classes. The first came about quite strangely. An agitated woman called Lin had pressured Tim to agreeing to help her with some kind of a class, with only the most mysterious of justifications, simply saying "I am nervous, I am very nervous". I offered to take his place, curious where this would lead, and found myself standing by a lecturn in a small cold room in front of three Chinese girls who didn't meet my eye once. Lin was working her way through a textbook, and wanted someone to read out a biography of Steven Spielberg in the first person, as though it were the great man himself addressing the class. So I gave my speech, "Hi there, I'm Steven Spielberg" and then stood in front of the class somewhat bemused as Lin continued with the lesson for the next half hour. She wanted the girls to read out sections of the text from memory, and if they described it in their own words, she would shout out, "Use the words of Spielberg!", even though of course these were merely the words of the far less famous text book author. She confided in me that the girls were like a piece of metal, and she needed to beat them and melt them in a metaphorical forge in order to improve their English. As I left she half offered and half begged me to teach with her in some capacity or other, and visited me daily to ask me again.
The other lesson I gave was for a cafe's small English class, I sat in front of the four students and we talked conversationally for an hour and a half. I had all but accepted the job, but then the somewhat Del-boy cafe manager informed me that he wanted me to be the manager of the cafe for two weeks before taking over the classes. He was massively drunk at this point, and I couldn't get him to explain what he wanted me to do as manager, beyond some vague remit to bring in more tourists. It was also clear that I would be expected to sit in his cafe "managing" for most of the day and night, and I found that as his words stumbled on I had decided working with him, or indeed Lin, wasn't going to be worth it.

Generally, Yangshao was not the place I wanted to stop for a month and teach. I wanted somewhere bigger, where there was more to the town than tourists and language students; I imagined I would just spend a month watching every Hollywood film from the last year on dvd in pleasant cafes. Myself and Tim took a 23 hour train to the capital of Yunnan province Kunming, a city apparently of minorities and year round spring.

Yangshao gave me more experience of how strange a place China is. Lynchpins of my culture that I guess I assumed to be as universal as the laws of mathematics are turning out to be unheard of here. Our travelling companion Kathy had never heard of Elvis, or indeed any major pop star I could think of. Her and I sat and she listened to Tim's CDs of Bob Marley and Jimi Hendrix for the first time (she really liked "All Along the Watchtowers"). Two funny girls called Penny and Celine who talked to us for ages told me my name meant "Big Cow" in Chinese, that I had a grown up face but the heart of a thirteen year old, that as I was cold I should eat dog to warm up, were I hot I should eat cat to cool down ("hot dog, cold cat"). I discover that the Chinese have their own system for counting on their fingers - e.g. ten is a cross with both index fingers. In a bar in Yangshao I wandered over to the group of young Chinese I mentioned earlier - the loud man of the group offered me a cigarette, then when I declined he very drunkenly told everyone I was not a real man. He then beat me at a left handed armwrestle and seemed satisfied that I should join in the drinking game. I started playing a Chinese variant of "paper, scissors, rock" with them. Two people face each other and sing, "two little bees, buzzing in the grass", and making wing flapping gestures with both hands, you then choose your weapon while shouting, "feyah!" (fly!). If you win, you air slap the other person and they mock recoil, if a draw you both blow two kisses at each other and the game continues.


An introduction to Communism

I definitely feel out of my depth in terms of how the Chinese think about business. The divide between friendship and business seems often impossible to define, if it exists at all. I think in England we have a rather prim sense that these are two worlds. We often find the idea of sales techniques or someone "acting chummy" rather unnerving. But in China, the two often seem like different sides of a rapidly spinning coin. The manifestation most familiar to me of this is the wonderful "customer service" that the traveller gets in restaurants - the waitress or manager will often sit down with you, chat away as much as their English allows, keep returning to ask you how the meal is going. On the other extreme, Chinese people sometimes say things and I have no idea if it is meant as advice or a sales pitch, like "Maybe you could contact this language school to teach there, I'm trying to do a favour for a friend who runs it", and such.
A cherished English idea, that at the end of the working day everyone heads to the pub, hierarchy is forgotten and the boss chats with the temp is, I think, something deeply rooted in our ideas of honesty and politeness, but I don't think the Chinese look at it this way. If a language teacher and his students go out for a meal after class, the students pay, to show their respect. In a cafe I overhear two American teachers insisting with knowing superiority that this time everyone will "go Dutch" - I wince at the obvious awkwardness of the Chinese at the table. But I do similar things - I initially sat among the students during the English lesson I gave, but shifted my seat after everyone insisted I have "teacher's chair".

The divide between the official economy and the under the table one is also often hazy. Finally learning about the importance of adapting to cold weather, I haggle in one shop a red North Face fleece down to 180 yuan. Does The North Face know Yangshao shops are selling these jackets for twelve pounds? To my untrained eye the quality seems excellent - are they fakes, are they excess runs from the Chinese factories that make them? None of the many travellers wearing them know, but these jackets seem to stop the artic winds well enough.


Another moment of feeling a straw sucking rube comes when Tim and I try to book a train ticket from the various Yangshao travel agents. Even the big official looking office refused to say how exactly they would get us a ticket, simply saying repeatedly, "90% chance we will get you a ticket, 90%". Agents rang other agents on mobiles, initial prices became only the "pre new year" price - we decided we'd rather head to the station ourselves and risk it. We were lucky, the attendent spoke a little English, and we boarded our train, hoping for some warmer weather at the end of our journey.

Daniel, 8 February, Kunming

Posted by Daniel on February 8, 2004 02:44 PM
Category: China
Comments
Email this page
Email this entry to:


Your email address:


Message (optional):




Designed & Hosted by the BootsnAll Travel Network