Consider the birds of the air..
And the lilies of the field. In which I reflect on getting to know a place through its flora and fauna.
This time of year, I hear the dawn chorus of mynas and bulbuls before my alarm goes off. I live on the eleventh floor, the top floor of the apartment block, and from the window the other buildings in the complex are blocky desert-ochre buttes and stacks, like cliffs and canyons in a video game. I think that’s how the buildings must look to the birds that inhabit their crevices, roosting on the flat roofs and nesting in the air conditioning vents. Sometimes I find a pigeon or a spotted dove perched on my window-ledge or balcony, perhaps eyeing my plants. I like the spotted doves. With their elegant buff-brown wings and black-and-white polka-dot cravats, they’re like fashionable pre-war gentlemen going out to their club; Bertie Wooster in bird form.
I’ve found over the years that in a new city or country, getting to know its animal and plant life is a way to get grounded in that place. My first week in Canal Town I was in Covid travel quarantine in my eleventh-story eyrie, but on two occasions I was allowed to leave to go for a PCR test. It was September, still warm. I walked along the street to the test centre, soaking in the sunshine and enjoying the temporary freedom. The street had broad verges with a winding footpath among bushes, and flittering around the bushes were dozens of butterflies, orange and sulphur-yellow and blue and black. They were magic. For the first time I felt that Canal Town was real, a three-dimensional, high-definition, full-colour, living, breathing place where there was life beyond quarantine.
Soon after I got out of quarantine, I began to notice the birds. I came out of my apartment building and in a tree near the entrance saw a small bird about the shape and size of a robin, but with the plumage of a magpie. It was like a robin dressed up as a magpie for a costume party. I looked it up when I got home, and was tickled to discover it was the Oriental Magpie-Robin. Since then, I’ve seen lots of them. Canal Town is also home to elegant white egrets that stalk among the reeds, and herons that hunch like grey old men on their perches, spying for fish, but in flight look like boxers in bomber jackets.
The birds in Beijing were different. The ones I miss most are the azure-winged magpies: think of a magpie but in genteel grey with dusty blue wings and tail, and a black cap on its head. They were plentiful on our campus, and I used to watch them hopping on the grass outside my office window, scouting for snacks and chattering to one another. Rarer and more exciting were the hoopoes and woodpeckers.
One thing I enjoy is not just the geographical sense of place that comes from knowing a few of the residents, but the fun of learning their local names and seeing how different languages categorise creatures differently. In Chinese, the humble sparrow is má què (麻雀). The què part is a signifier for a variety of small birds. When I look it up by itself in the dictionary, I find it translated as just bird or sparrow. The má character could mean hemp or flax or several other related concepts. So a sparrow is literally a “hemp què”. But it intrigues me that peacocks are also què: they are kǒng què (孔雀). Kǒng usually means a hole or an opening. It’s also a family name (the most famous Kǒng is probably Kǒng fūzi, the “Master Kong” who has been Latinized as Confucius). I speculate that kǒng què get their name from the many “eyes” they show when they fan their tails, but let me know if you have better information! In any case, it amuses me that such a glamorous bird has the unglamorous name of hole bird. (The English name is no more flattering. Apparently it has nothing to do with peas, but derives from what the Romans thought their call sounded like. I love etymology!)
As well as birds, the other thing I’ve loved getting to know in new places is the plant life. In springtime, I miss the hosts of daffodils and crocuses we have at home, but I rejoice in the tree blossoms: plum, apricot, cherry, peach. There are plenty in Canal Town, but my most vivid mental images are of the blossoms in Beijing, perhaps because it’s so dry there that in winter everything is brown and yellow and grey. Then I’d arrive at work one day and find that, with all the surprise and pizzazz of creatio ex nihilo, the bare trees that lined the road through campus had exploded in shocking pink, like candyfloss, like an accident on the set of the Barbie movie. I loved it and marvelled at it every year. The other scene that comes to mind is the hillsides outside Beijing, crested with crumbling turrets of the Great Wall and covered in delicate drifts of foamy white — wave upon wave of apricot blossom.
There are other flowers and trees I came to know and love in China, ones that are unusual or struggle to grow in Scotland: lilac, peonies, wistaria, gingko. Sometimes I daydream about planting a garden with them when I go home, as living memories of my time here.
One thing I do hope I will keep is the ability life in China has given me of a kind of selective vision: being able to block out the dust and roar of an eight-lane ring road or the drab canyons of concrete apartment blocks and appreciate the beauty of a small patch of flowers or the flight of a bird. There are many, many beautiful places in China, don’t get me wrong — but in many urban centres, especially in the dry north, pollution and concrete make large parts of the cities less pleasing to the eye. After being there for a while, though, you develop a way of ignoring the (physical) ugliness and taking joy in the small things.
I have also come to appreciate greatly the effort that many cities make to beautify the environment. From late spring, right through summer and into autumn, many of Beijing’s ring roads and highways are lined with clambering roses, along the verges and median strips. You might be stuck in traffic for an hour on the way home, but at least you can enjoy the display of hues from creamy yellow through peachy orange to rich red. My employer ran a shuttle bus from campus to the area where I lived. There was usually some lively chat and banter on the way home, and when the roses were out, there were always appreciative comments.
In general, I’ve often found Chinese friends quicker than others in noticing a beautiful flower or fine view, and quicker to comment or to stop and enjoy it. When I had just moved to Beijing as a postdoc, the students in our research group organised a trip to the Botanic Gardens. It was the tail end of winter, so much of the gardens were still bare and yellow, but the glasshouses abounded in greenery and colour. The students delighted in it, with none of the cynicism or world-weariness that their peers in the UK might have shown. They took photo after photo. Everyone took a turn posing with the giant cacti. Their sense of wonder was refreshing. And that’s another thing I hope I take with me.
New to Canal Town? Start here for an introduction!
Miss my last post? Catch up below!
Never thought of multi-story buildings like desert buttes, but now the parallel will always be stuck in my head. Especially on a bright day, when the concrete and windows seem to waver in the sun.
Great sensory detail throughout this whole article.