“Wo bu zai zhong guo!” (“I am not in China!”) I cried.
My laoshi (teacher) was confused, and thought perhaps I hadn’t expressed myself properly. “Ni zai nar?” (“Where are you?”) she asked.
“Wo zai wai guo ren di fang.” (“I am in the foreign people’s place.”) I replied, gumly.
And it’s true. I’m not in China – not really. I am in this absurd Westerners’ bubble. I study and socialise only with foreigners, in foreigner populated places. I hardly ever speak Mandarin. I have no idea what is happening in China because I can’t read their news sites, and I’m not talking in a meaningful way to any Chinese on a regular basis.
Here I am, living and breathing in this bizarre parallel universe, and there are all these things happening here, so many things for me to learn about this place – and I am like a blind, deaf and mute woman in their midst.
There is only two hours a week that I am actually in China, and that is when I gatecrash the zhong guo xue sheng (Chinese students’) class. As I step into that room on a Tuesday morning, the effect is immediately transformative. It’s like crossing a national boundary: I enter a space that is inhabited by Chinese, for the Chinese, the Chinese being themselves.
Yes the class is in English, but they are all Chinese. The tutor is Chinese. The material is prepared for Chinese students. They discuss things among each other, as Chinese. Sure, when I speak up I’m like a foreign spice added to the mix, but most of the time I am just a fly on the wall.
Why am I here? I discussed this with an Australian friend, who, in agreement with my sentiment, commented, “if I was here to just have fun, there are better cities to do that. Beijing isn’t a very fun city.”
And it’s true. The nightlife and creative scene has nothing on London, New York, Berlin, even Sydney. The weather sucks. The city is monstrously big, and just cannot compare when it comes to the chilled out, happy-good-times lifestyle of home. Not to mention, most importantly, it has none of the people I care about the most in this world (although don’t get me wrong, potentially some of my new friends here will prove to be lifelong buddies.)
So why am I here? I’m here to be in China. To really be in China. Because I am interested in the people, the culture, and this nation’s future – that will, in many ways, become the future of humanity. And because there is a good chance that I will become so interested, I will want to become a part of what is “going on” here.
Well then, what to do? It’s time I entered China – for real this time, and at least for most of the week. I’m going to start off with the language. From Monday to Thursday, only speak in Chinese. And next semester I want to move out of university dorms and into a share apartment with Chinese – one of whom should speak no English. And I want to meet up with more language partners, and just generally be making more of an effort to speak, speak, speak, connect, bathe, drown in China.
I’m in love.
His name is 韩寒, or Han Han. He’s a young, Chinese novelist, blogger and, and, AND, A RACECAR DRIVER. That triple threat just made by brain explode all over the keyboard.
Oh and I almost forgot to mention, he’s gorgeous.
This all started when, yesterday, I asked the class about young, Chinese artists and writers today. Were their works political? Did they examine themes like class struggle?
The tutor answered that writers today covered a broader range of topics: gender, sexuality, and ethnic minorities (by that she was referring to this nation’s ethnic minorities, of which there are 55. But they’re greatly outnumbered by the 91% of the nation who fall into the Han group – of which I belong to.)
The class brought up two, exciting young writers, of the “post 80s generation” (the generation born after 1980, which is when the Chinese government began to strictly enforce the one-child policy.) Their stories were very “alternative” and highly relevant to the Chinese youth. Neither had gone to university, and one had even dropped out of high school. The tutor commented it was interesting that these writers, poster children of the new gen of Chinese, had always operated “out of the system”.
The next day, and reflecting on these two writers thought to myself, boy they sound sexy! I kicked myself for not having written down their names, so jumped on the internet and emailed my friend from the class about them. She wrote back,
The two youth writers we were talking about are 韩寒 (Han Han) and 郭敬明 (Guo Jingming), both of whom belong to the post-80s generation writers. Han Han is more realistic and thought-provoking (he is also an awsome F1 driver) while Guo Jingming is more dreamy and commercial. You may find them an interesting comparison.
I quickly Googled Han Han. Hot, I knew it! I found him on Wikipedia, and by the end of the page, was, am, desperately in love. (I’m going to pause here before this post descends into a rabble of Twi-fan proportion OMG HE’S SOOOOO HAAAWWWWT WE ARE TOTES MEANT TO BE TOGETHER etc. etc. So let me just say that if you read the Wikipedia entry, it’s like God made an imprint of everything my subconscious had been looking for in a soulmate. - OK that was a bit much.)
I was bursting to tell someone. I grabbed my Chinese friend on gchat and “announced” that I was in love. I asked if she knew of my lover, and of course she did, he’s quite famous here, saying “he’s pretty rebellious and has written many articles critizing the government and stuff.”
But I wondered how out of the system he really was. I found this article from the New York Times that focuses on Guo Jingming, but also mentions Han Han:
Guo is the most successful of a dozen young celebrity authors who make up the “post-’80s” generation, some others of whom have also achieved book sales in the millions. This group includes the high school dropout and professional car racer Han Han, 25, who derides China’s inefficient educational system in his novels and regularly insults older, more established artists on his blog, and Zhang Yueran, 26, whose novel “Daffodils Took Carp and Went Away” features a bulimic girl who falls in love with her stepfather, is mistreated by her mother and is sent off to boarding school.
While the Chinese government frequently jails dissident writers or forces them into exile, it mostly ignores the antics of Guo and the other post-’80s writers. For all their flamboyance, they exemplify the social ideals of the new China — commercialism and individualism — said Lydia Liu, a professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Columbia University. They “don’t pose any threat,” Liu said. “They collaborate.”
Without being able to read Chinese, it’s hard for me to comment. In any case, I have something new to motivate me when it comes to my language studies: I want to be able to read Han Han’s blog. I may even say that the next time I get answered the stock standard expat question: “why did you decide to learn Chinese?”
- “So that I’m able to read Han Han’s blog. …DUH.”
More interesting posts, about the interesting Han Han:
ninemsn
There’s nothing like a bit of eye candy to help ease the pain of a long flight. And while anti-discriminatory lawsuits may have put an end to the days in which “stewardesses” were hired on looks and coquettishness (not to mention the short hemlines!), there are still some airlines that recapture elements of the long-gone glamour era of flying.
I gatecrashed another Chinese lecture today, this time about queer/lesbian theory. I was surprised to find that even in that class, of mature, thoughtful, generally female post-grad students, who no doubt have more liberal attitudes than your average Chinese – well even they were very unaccustomed to and felt uncomfortable with gay people/ culture/ rights – with gayness in general.
I tried to forgive them for this, and remember that this country is back by about 30 or so years when it comes to the acceptance of homosexuality. (I believe it was only de-illegalised a few years ago. There are no laws to protect homosexuals from discrimination.)
I think they were a little shocked by my ‘liberal’ attitudes towards homosexuality, plus sexual orientation and gender identities. As I said to them, I come from one of the most multicultural cities in the world, where women have the same rights as men, and has one of the biggest homosexual communities in the world. A homosexual community that isn’t just “tolerated” but is, on the whole, celebrated and has and continues to influence the wider city culture in a big way.
My city is dynamic, open, with lots of different ideas, cultures, subcultures, ways of life, and looking at the world, mixing altogether. And for me, my identity roles: as a woman, as a Chinese Australian, as a (generally) straight person, as a professional, as a hipsterllectual, as someone participating in online communities that know no physical borders, and many others – these are very unstable, mutating, complicated, sometimes indistinct from their so-called binary opposite.
Whereas my initial impressions from China has been that it is a country coming out of a very long period of having been closed. Compared to Australia, there is little multiculturalism (you are clearly classified as either a mainland Chinese born and bred local, or a foreigner) and very traditional identity roles, which are only slowly being chipped away at. Here, it’s very clear that if you’re born with a certain body (male/ female) what you’re meant to do. And so long as you do it, you’ll be fine.
(Too bad if you feel inclinations otherwise.)
I thought perhaps I was being too harsh, but then the tutor leader, also the dean of the department, spoke up. She said when she spent some time studying in Australia, she found the experience to be extremely disorientating, because it seemed like nothing was fixed. It was a challenge, and in some respects began to question herself.
An interesting China-specific gay issue was passed onto me by my gay Spanish friend here. He told me of his gay, Chinese housemate, who at 30 was at the receiving end of increasing pressure from his parents to marry. In truth, he didn’t mind being with women, but marriage was out of the question because it’d mean he’d have to stop having sex with men! Like most gay and lesbian people in this country, he hadn’t come out to his parents.
And he, like almost all the young urban-born Chinese, was an only child. Which meant there was an even greater pressure on him to marry, procreate, and thereby continue the family line.
