ninemsn
In a country where a love of food — both cooking and eating! — lies at the heart of their culture, can it be any surprise that Italy is home to some of the world’s best cuisine? And while a few of their dishes have found considerable fame abroad, at home Italy is a country of many provinces, each specialising in distinctly different tastes, produce and dishes. We let our stomachs do the walking as we travel the food trail from north to south and discover the many faces of Italian food.
ninemsn
On your last holiday you may have seen some of the most beautiful things this world has to offer — but you wouldn’t know it by your photos. All that breathtaking scenery, exotic cultures and delicious local dishes, deserve some half-decent photos to remember them by. We invite some experienced travel snappers to share their simple travel photography tips, to help you improve your camera skills.
Image credit: Eva Chan
Ah, China.
How she makes me laugh, despair, and burn with wonder. Having returned to Beijing to study Mandarin for at least another year, there’s no doubt that our relationship is “back on”. But what kind of relationship is it?
As someone with limited (but gradually improving) Chinese, she is still a neighbour whose parties I can rarely attend. Every day there are strange, wonderful noises coming from her huge, ramshackle house. She herself is brash, loud, old as hell but energetic like a teenager. I have no doubt she has a million interesting stories but alas, I can’t understand a single one of them. We smile at each other from across the fence, but it’s hard to have a deep relationship.
I’ve written about my problematic “outsider” status in Beijing before, describing myself as a “a blind, deaf and mute woman in their midst.” This is particularly frustrating when you’re the kind of person who likes to get under the surface of things. And when you’re working as a journalist or writer of sorts, I believe you have a professional duty to come from a place of genuine and sincere insight.
(Other journalists have argued to me otherwise. But I always like to imagine a Chinese journalist going to Australia. They’re living there for two years and speaking nothing but basic English, the kind you use to buy milk and eggs. They’re unable to have conversations with people without the use of translator, or consume local news, television, magazines, radio, films, etc. Can that person really do a decent job of reporting stories about Australia?)
I recently put this question to a photographer friend of mine, Eva Chan. I’ve returned to BJ with a cheap SLR that I want to learn to use, and I wondered if the lack of language skills would prove to be less of a disability when it came to taking photographs. Like me, Eva is an overseas born Chinese and gave me this wonderful response:
If you will allow me a moment of geekiness, I like to compare our collective situation to being from Krypton. Krypton is Superman’s original planet. On krypton, he’s nothing special… but once on earth, he has super powers.
(I told you I was a closet geek). The situation is analogous because like Superman, we did nothing to earn our super powers, but by the mere fact that we are from English speaking countries and transplanted to a developing nation, it’s like we have super powers. At least, that’s how the locals see us, even if we don’t see ourselves that way.
Have you noticed that when a person from a developing nation moves to a more developed one, s/he is called an “immigrant” but when in reverse, we are called “expats”. The underlying assumption is that expats will a) return to their home country and b) are paid many times above their local counter parts and c) the unspoken assumption: which is expats don’t need to learn the local language to survive. Therein lies the dichotomy between how most westerners in Beijing perceive themselves, how locals see us, and how you see yourself.
So to answer your question directly: I don’t think we are actually “disabled” although we are definitely “outsiders” in China. As for genuine insight into culture … it’s hard to say who are the true experts, isn’t it? In some respects, the “expert” of a culture is someone who is from it, and probably has never left before. But as Mark Twain would say, you don’t get insight or broad views by rotting in one small corner of the earth your whole life
I suspect that is what you are for many people as well. Your insight and eloquence is the equivalent to your camera. Your blog is a combination of stories and musings about an unfamiliar place. You marvel at the things that makes Beijing unique, tragic or ironic. In my mind.. that’s what makes someone an “expert”
Eva has a great point. There is a lot of value to outsiders coming in and proving commentary and an original perspective. I guess the key is a mix though. After all, any ol’ backpacker can go to a new country and make some sweeping, superficial assesments. But it is with the foreign journalists and artists who have put in some serious sweat and dedication into learning the local language and developing a meaningful relationship with a place that I have the most respect.
“Would you accept $1million on the condition that you could never leave Sydney? Even on holidays?” This was a hypothetical posed to the group at drinks last night, and came back to me in thought as I ended a very fine weekend in Sydney, crossing the harbour bridge in a train bound for the suburbs. That blue ocean sprayed with starry sunlight, a sight so magnificent even the most jaded of Sydney-siders look up from their novels, or newspapers, or general despondent nothing, to admire the view and sighing think, “how beautiful”. It’s such a dazzling, resplendent beauty you almost feel the city is consciously and shamefully flaunting itself.
Being back in Sydney inevitably causes me to reflect on a life lived divided into two cities, – and consider which of the two is more worthy. This last year in Beijing has been, in some respects, a bit of a failure. There I have resumed life as a student, an exchange student at that, living on campus. As you can guess, at 90% of the dinners I sat down in I have been the oldest person at the table. So, you could say that the last year has been like reliving my early 20s.
The problem is, at 26, it doesn’t feel so much like a nostalgic walk down memory lane, so much as a nauseating feeling that I haven’t quite moved on. All around me there are kids – great kids, but still, kids – doing what you do in your early 20s: solid drinking, clubs, one-night stands, obsessive crushes, self-combusting friendships, study, internships, part-time work, travel, non-stop adventures. Mostly things that I, too, have partaken in while in Beijing.
I’ve come back to Sydney and caught up with old friends, and found myself craving the components of their lives: careers, salaries, stable relationships, old friends, family, apartments, news, politics, exercise, cooking, brunches, movies, art exhibitions, gigs, nice things, direction, stability. This weekend was a peek into what my life could look like should I return, and I liked it.
Of course, many of these things I could have in Beijing. If I quit the student life, took up full-time work, and accordingly shook up my social habits. But there will always be one vital ingredient that Sydney will always have over every other city on this planet.
Old friends.
OK and family, citizenship and therefore participation in the political process – but let’s just focus on friendships today. One of my best friends has just made her first move to another city. And in writing about making new friends, she points out, her very full life in Sydney contained:
… the number and quality of friends that comes from spending twentysomething years of one’s life in the same city.
As someone who is now onto her fourth city of living (Sydney, London, Buenos Aires and now Beijing) I feel that while I’ve become better and better and making new friends, and quantity is no issue, it will almost always be impossible to ever replicate the quality of my Sydney friendships. And this is said with full respect to all the amazing people I’ve met in Beijing, there is one missing and impossible ingredient: time.
I’ve regularly said that no friendship can be considered true until tested with time. Time allows a friendship to go through all sorts of trials and tribulations: new boyfriends, new friends, family dramas, career jealousies, political divisions, religious awakenings, changing lifestyles and interests, deaths, sicknesses and births.
What’s amazed me is that I have a handful of truly great Sydney friends, one whom I’ve known for over 20 years, and the newest still a mature 6 years, whose friendships – though ebbed and waned in that time – remain now intact and very much awesome. And they are like this, partly because living in one city for most of one’s life gives you the opportunity to (subconsciously) ‘cull’ away the friendships that didn’t work from those that did, but also because the fact that they remained in tact through all those hardships only made them stronger.
Don’t believe me? Think about one of your best friends, who’s known you for ages. You don’t just love him or her because you think they’re great, they think you’re great, and life is a riot when you’re together (and it is.) You also love them because they know about your foibles, about your fucked up relationship with you parents, about your vanities, and insecurities, about your bad romances, and worst habits. And yet they still love you, as you do them. And they bring the best out of you. They bring the best friend out in you.
That kind of inside-and-outside, through-and-through trust and insight is irreplaceable. These friendships are like a battered old chair or wooden bench. It’s been through the wars, but the fact that it’s remained is a testament to its strength; prosaically dependable, comfortable, loving, magically all the right dimensions, a vital presence.
I want to stress one more time that I am so grateful for some of the amazing friendships I’ve made in Beijing. But by the very nature of the expat lives we lead in that city, where most people stay 6 months, 1 year, a few years at the most, these friendships will never be given the time ingredient that is so necessary for them to become vital. And once you accept that the revolving door of friendships inherent in expat life can never replace those of your home city, one must ask how important is this to you?
For me, the older I get, increasingly so.
(That said, I’d like to write a future post make the case for living overseas, at least once for a few years.)
If I gave you the following list of names:
- Margaret
- Jennifer
- Britney
- Raylene
- Dorothy
- Talitha
- Chloe
You’d probably have some associations with these names. Maybe you could come up with a character for each, with certain attributes, perhaps reminiscent of celebrities, fictional characters or people in your life. You’d probably associate certain feelings or thoughts to the names: sophisticated? old-fashioned? bitchy? bogan? slutty?
But what if this is the list of names I gave you?
- Yun Xue
- Hui Ting
- Miao Ling
- Mei Feng
- Xiao Lian
- Zhen Zhen
- Wen Qian
A little more difficult, right? Most of you wouldn’t even know if these are girls or boys names – or if they’re names at all (they’re all girls names), let alone the associations attached to them. But like in English there are associations: certain names would be popular in different times, or strongly associated with certain (possibly disgraced) popstars, actors or politicians, they may give away what class or province you’re from, or what kind of parents you have.
(Not to mention their more literal meaning. In English, ‘Julia’ for example may mean ‘youthful’, but you would never say, “hey your skin is looking so Julia today!” Whereas Chinese names often make use of ordinary words. Take my name, for example: 陈韵雪, Chen Yun Xue. The third character 雪 means snow. As in tomorrow’s weather there will be a lot of 雪. In any case my point is, even if you were to learn the literal meaning, which is relatively easy to do, you still wouldn’t know about the social and historical contextual associations.)
And the thing to remember is not only are you unaware of that society’s understanding of these names, there’s the inevitable associations you bring from your own cultural context. So in that list of names, a Westerner may choose to stay clear of the names starting with “Zh” and “X” because in our language they’re quite rare and sound quite harsh – even though a Chinese person would consider those names quite beautiful.
Let me wrap this up by saying this is pretty much what it’s like for me all the time in China. Even though I can be here in the thick of things, looking and experiencing the same things, the same city, the same events, and news as a Chinese person, I am utterly in the dark about the context. I can process the facts, but completely miss the point, or even more dangerously use my ‘Western eyes’ to come up with a totally messed up reading.
Which is why I caution anyone who trusts a journo that lands here without a lick of Chinese, and thinks a few weeks here is enough to call themselves an expert. China is the closest thing we have to another planet, so aliens should expect to come with a radically open mind and put in the hard yards before they can come close to understanding this place.
And lastly, knowing something is different to feeling something. So I can be told my name is beautiful sounding, but to me, it’s not at all, in fact I have totally neutral feelings towards it. It will probably take years of cultural immersion before I develop any feelings towards my name. Once I do, I’ll realise I’ve internalised knowledge and, whadayaknow, become just that little more Chinese!
(Meanwhile, it works both ways. Check out this hilarious video about Chinese people picking their English names:)
