“Where can I see real life?”
My colleagues and I looked at each other. It was the first day of work for our new colleague, James* from London, and he had lots of questions. This was one he seemed particularly keen on getting an answer to.
Part of me wanted to question his assumption that our students and the university community are not “real life”. Why should factory workers or elderly farmers be more the “real” China than our over-achieving video-gaming Nike-wearing rich-kid students? In any society, with all its baroque complexities of strata and subcultures, rich as a rainforest or reef ecosystem, what counts as “real life”? But I wasn’t going to say that the first day I met someone. And at the same time, I know what he means. Our campus is a clipped-grass bubble, cut off from the local community by walls of prestige and self-importance (as well as by a moat and facial-recognition scanners). And I’m glad James doesn’t want to spend all his time in this ivory tower.
In fact, in the couple of weeks James has been in Canal Town, he’s already explored parts of the city that I’ve rarely, if ever, been to. He’s shown up at work enthusing with all of a newcomer’s excitement about the night market, and the noodle shop he tried, and the disco-ball nightclubs he's poked his head into. One morning we came in to work to find a stuffed toy goose perched on top of the hot-water boiler where we fill our tea mugs. We wondered where it had come from, until James arrived and told us he had won it at a hoopla stall at the night market. We were going to take him out to one of our favourite local restaurants this weekend, but he had already made plans to attend a “visual poetry slam” in Shanghai.
His enthusiasm is refreshing. I’ve seen other newcomers to China struggle hugely with culture shock and mismatched expectations. My next-door neighbour, for example, has been in China two-and-a-half years and took a violent dislike to the entire country and culture almost as soon as he arrived. He hates the food (“I like Chinese food in New York, but the food here is different!”), complains that local people don’t speak English, and says there is no “culture”, by which he means West End plays and orchestras playing Western classical music. There are extenuating circumstances — he arrived right in the middle of the draconian rules and regulations of the “zero-Covid” period, when life here was definitely not normal, so he got off to a bad start. I feel sorry for him, but after many fruitless conversations have given up trying to help him see beyond his own blinkers. Our new colleague, on the other hand, has arrived at a much happier time and perhaps with a more open mind.
Maybe James’ eagerness to explore is what nudged me to walk into town to meet friends for dinner at the weekend, rather than cycling or taking a taxi. I took the new elevated walkway the city has constructed above some of the streets and waterways, then descended to thread my way through the narrow side streets on the way to the restaurant. Pools of light spill onto the cluttered pavement from the shop fronts that line the way: seamstresses at ancient sewing machines, jewellers with arrays of gold bracelets, butchers, wig shops, mobile phone shops, cobblers, sacks of soybeans and other dried legumes, and somewhere, the aroma of hot roast chestnuts.
It brought back memories of when I was a newbie in China myself, when I spent a couple of years in the ancient capital of Xi’an. I remember the raw giddiness of venturing into the crowded markets and “city villages” near the university campus. These “city villages” (城中村, chéngzhōngcūn, literally “village in the middle of a city”) were warrens of cheap low-rise houses and shops where migrants from the countryside, or just those with less income, could find a foothold. I think many of them originally were actual country villages, before the city swallowed them. The names give them away: the one nearest our campus was Yángjiācūn (杨家村), Yang Family Village. Before I left Xi’an, Yang Family Village had been demolished and a new road put through, and the market that it merged into at one end had become a four-storey shopping mall.
I think all the “city villages” are gone now. During the winter holiday, I went back to Xi’an for the first time in several years. It was good to catch up with old friends and to re-visit old haunts. The area around the university looked more or less the same, and even our old favourite bakery was still there. But the district of Chang’an, where I lived for a while, was almost unrecognisable. It used to be a quiet place on the outskirts of the city, where the most lively evening activity was the older ladies dancing in the main square. It’s now flashing with lights and shopping malls, and ringing with the noise of pneumatic machinery digging the city’s next subway line. I counted three branches of Starbucks along the main street alone. Fifteen years ago, an excursion to Starbucks was a huge treat. I think there were two branches in Xi’an at the time: one next to the Drum Tower, in the heart of the tourist zone, and the other in the hi-tech development zone. American friends who lived in the neighbouring province of Henan would sometimes take the train to Xi’an just to enjoy Starbucks. And now they’re ten a penny.
The changes in Chang’an were a little disconcerting. One of the days I was there, I took the bus from my hosts’ place to the subway station, and spent almost the whole journey trying in vain to recognise landmarks. Near the end of my journey, I found one: the hotel where my friend and I used to go swimming on Saturdays. It looked less posh than it used to. I got off the bus then, and was walking towards the subway station, when something about the street triggered memories. The subway station was new, but take that away, and look down that alley…
Round the corner, there was a bustling street market. It was crowded with people selling fruit, vegetables, New Year decorations, sausages, roasted chestnuts, hot vegetable-stuffed breads, wigs, lucky red underwear, roast chicken legs. There were Hui men, Muslims, selling cuts of mutton, and I realised how few ethnic minorities I see in Canal Town. Xi’an is much more diverse in that regard. I pushed slowly through the throng, savouring the smells and sounds, the steam rising from a baozi seller’s cart and mingling with the smog, still not entirely sure whether it was the place I remembered, until I found the old church building where I used to go. I was glad it was still there. I drifted on through the crowd to the far end of the street before looping round and getting on the subway to my next appointment.
Walking through that market street, I felt a sense of relief that the old Xi’an, what feels like the “real” Xi’an, was still there in all its glorious chaotic bustle, behind the shiny new subway lines and sterile proliferation of Starbucks. I’m guilty of the same romanticism as my new colleague, I guess. In reality, any country is a mixture of old and new, and needs both. And when I actually went to one of those Starbucks branches, after a couple of days with my caffeine-free hosts, I couldn’t get my hands on that latte fast enough.
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I can understand the romanticism! I think I mentioned previously, when I went to Xi'an I had felt sort of disinterested in a lot of the tourist-y stuff we had done there. Compared to my time in Chengdu where I spent all of it with those born in the city, we spent Xi'an being led around by professional tour guides (who were wonderful for the record, though I've never been a huge fan of the big tourist-y sort of experiences). The highlight of our trip to Xi'an for me was a moment where I walked off from our little group of tourists and found myself in a small neighborhood - it was purely by accident but I just wanted to leave the busy night market in the center of the city and find something new! I wasn't expecting just 2 blocks over to find a lovely calm neighborhood filled with the bustling life of every day experience just calmly existing. It made my heart warm and is still one of the most memorable experiences I had from the summer I spent in China in 2019. Of course, my miniscule time there pales in experience to yours, but I appreciate the ability to reminisce. Thank you as always!