The rain’s stopped. After almost two weeks of almost constant rainfall, today is dry underfoot and instead of the drum and patter of water on windows and walls, I hear cicadas shrill and bulbuls chatter. The laundry that spend two fruitless days on the balcony now dries overnight in the hairdryer-hot air. When I come out of the lift downstairs, there are no longer huge scabs and scales of plaster fallen from the lobby ceiling, and the floor is no longer slick with moisture. It’s a relief. I’d begun to feel like the guys in Ray Bradbury’s short story A Long Rain. We’ve just come out of the Plum Rain season.
The Plum Rain (梅雨, méi yǔ) is an annual feature of this area of China, just south of the Yangtze. Some people also call it by a homophone, 霉雨 (méi yǔ), Mildew Rain. I prefer Plum Rain, named for the early plums that fruit around this time, but I understand Mildew Rain. Unless you’re careful, this is the time when the clothes and bedding in your cupboards could easily sprout colonies of mould. Around campus, mosses have flourished, emerald cushions caulking the slippery paving stones, and the canals are glutted with grey-brown water.
The rain was especially heavy in some places this year, causing flooding further south. Our long-awaited trip to Huangshan, the Yellow Mountain, was cancelled last-minute when the hotel called to say the mountain was closed because of the rain. It’s made me slower and less efficient in packing and clearing my apartment, as I put off sploshing to the recycling bins with another load of cardboard, or refresh my weather app again to check whether it’s likely to ease off enough to go over to campus without being soaked to the skin.
So, no big-bang mountain-top bucket-list tick, but I have enjoyed many heart-warming moments with friends. My department held a farewell dinner, which finished with all my Chinese colleagues singing a song of parting, karaoke-style. My Ukrainian friends held a party for their baby son’s first birthday, which was great fun, especially the long conversations with the baby’s grandmother, visiting from Ukraine for a month. She speaks Ukrainian, Russian and some French. I speak some very rusty French and some random words of Russian from when I did it on DuoLingo for six months or so during Covid lockdowns. She chatted at great length in Russian, throwing in French words here and there, and I smiled and nodded a great deal. “L’enfant merveilleux!” she kept saying about her grandson, in between showing photos of her scary-looking dogs and talking about her former life as a power plant engineer (I think).
I’ve also enjoyed some fun “only in China”, or at least “not in Scotland” moments, which I should make the most of before leaving.
The first happened when I went to the hairdresser one wet afternoon. Haircuts are much cheaper here, and to make the most of it before going back to the land of expensive hairdressing, I decided I’d also get a summer-holiday streak of colour in my hair. I wanted a kind of turquoise or mint-green, something like the colour of Hebridean sea over white sand, and went armed with photos I’d found online. At the hairdresser’s, I showed the boss lady pictures of the kind of colour and style I was looking for. She then handed me over to two of the hairdresser lads. (Most Chinese hairdressers are men). As she gave them their instructions, I thought I heard her say “light blue”, but I didn’t catch everything, and there’s also the ambiguity of shades of colour in different languages to consider, so I didn’t worry about it. I had spent the morning dealing with the hassle of a courier who wouldn’t take my package because I didn’t have a Chinese ID card, and now I was happy to relax and trust the hairdresser boys while they fiddled with combs and foil and bleach.
Some three hours later (which gave me plenty of time to catch up on reading), they rinsed out my hair and I saw the colour for the first time. Dark royal blue. The streaks were fine, and they had done a nice job — I was happy with the overall effect — but I was puzzled by the colour. Miscommunication, I thought. The young man asked what I thought.
“It looks good,” I said, “but, um, more blue than I imagined.”
“Oh,” he said, “that pale green colour you wanted would wash out really fast. This darker colour is better!”
I was too amused to be angry. Then, after I paid up, the two lads asked me to come back to the chair so they could take photos showing their handiwork. They’ll probably post them as advertising on social media. After they’d fussed around with lights and phone cameras for five minutes or so, I told them I had to go. “Any more photos and I’ll be the one charging you,” I joked. They laughed nervously and said goodbye. And I do actually like the colour. It’s more of a deep-sea blue now. It’ll still match the waters of the islands when I’m home in a few weeks’ time.
Then there were the ferrets. A couple of nights ago, I went out for dinner with friends to a Yunnan-style restaurant in town that specialises in mushrooms. They were ready to close, but graciously kept the kitchen open until we’d ordered. Next to the fridge where they kept the beer and soft drinks, there was a large cage with a lot of small-animal play equipment and two very lively ferrets. While we ate, the waiter chatted with us, and I asked whether the ferrets were dangerous (there was a sign on the cage asking people not to pet them).
“That one bites, and that one doesn’t,” he replied, pointing. He must have read my mind. A few minutes later, he took the non-biting one out of the cage and brought it over so we could pet it. I stroked its fur, surprisingly coarse, and scratched behind its ears and thought about how that would never happen in the UK.
These are the kinds of things I’ll miss about life here. And I’ll just have to come back and visit Huangshan some other time. Some of my friends here use the phrase “leave some regrets” (留点遗憾, liú diǎn yíhàn). When you visit somewhere, they say, don’t try and see everything. Don’t try and do everything. Leave something to draw you back again next time.
New to Canal Town? Start here for an introduction!
Miss my last post? Catch up below!