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“Publishing a book was a big thing, an extraordinary thing for me. I’ve been overwhelmed that it’s been successful,” says the Chinese journalist who wrote about growing up during the Cultural Revolution. “I was taken out of school at sixteen and sent to work in a factory. I did that for ten years. I taught myself English through listening to the radio. Someone I knew had access to one. Contraband.”
“Were you a bookworm?” I ask.
“I always had so much work to do. Work in the factory. Work in the house. But if I went to the bathroom even for two minutes, I would read a bit of a book in there.”
The journalist studied at university in the UK and often returns there. I meet her when she’s in London for a few weeks doing some property-related business and chopping through a new Chinese embassy procedure regarding a visa. “They have changed the regulations,” she says – a phrase which arises in every conversation about official Chinese matters. China’s megalith of bureaucratic stipulations shifts on its hinges every six months. Whatever the requirements once were, whichever documents had to be submitted, whoever was required to receive the submission, the criteria will have changed since the last time anyone checked, and will change again shortly. Despite this, I’m impressed the my multiple exceptions, get-outs, grey areas, dodges, skives, middle-people and allowances which makes things easier in such an apparently rigorous, unbending, totalitarian system: a tightly controlled society is always loose at the edges.
“We were brought up by my grandmother who was so kind. Perhaps she was a bit picky about her food, but that was because food had been so scarce. But my father was very selfish. I remember he would fight with us, fight his own children, to get to the food. That is one of my memories. But I still pay his medical bills.”
The journalist lives in Beijing with her two clever, cosmopolitan and gifted half-English daughters, both of whom are planning on studying abroad.
“At the international school, they can be so racist. The other students say to my younger daughter, ‘Oh, you look so Chinese. We can tell that you’re foreign.’ And so she’s developed this idea that to be Chinese is somehow inferior. But she’ll grow out of it. At the school, she surprised them all by giving a mock TEDx talk – on feminism. And it completely took them all by surprise.”
“Tell me, what can I do for you when you come to China? Do you need a place to stay? My place in Beijing is empty at the moment,” says the journalist. She’s already been so generous, greeting me with a gift of an exquisite black silk bag.
“It’s okay. I’m staying with my friend Peaches.”
“Where?” asks Lijia.
“I’m not sure. The…Chaoyang district? The cool one?”
“That doesn’t mean anything. The Chaoyang district is so large it takes one hour in a car to drive from end to end.”
“I’m going to have to get used to living in a city of 21 million people, which is constantly growing. How many ring roads are there by now? London’s small by comparison.”
“So you don’t need an apartment. Do you want to be introduced to people? I can invite you to lots of things. And if you don’t understand what’s going on I can translate. You can come to lots of women’s events. We can fire them up. Get everyone to mobilise.”
“More than anything I want to get to know Chinese people, not just expats.”
“That is the difficult thing. Even I live halfway between the expat life and the Chinese life.”
“And I want to learn Mandarin.”
“To speak it, or to read it too?”
“To read.”
“I’ll teach you two words. So, here we are, drinking tea.”
On my notebook she draws three characters stacked tight on top of each other: a long dumbbell with a cross-bar at either end; a collapsing chair, side on; a crucifix with a tick of a tail and two wing-flicks.
“The top one is the character for grass. And you’ll see, if I draw the traditional symbol for it,” she draws two neatly forked sprigs, “it looks like grass. The middle one is the sign for a person.”
“I recognise that.”
“And the bottom sign is the sign for wood. So tea is ‘a person between grass and wood.’ It evokes the idea of tea leaves but it also represents the Asian mindset, or should I say the Chinese mindset, of a person in relationship with nature. And do you know the word for ‘home’?”
Just under ‘person between grass and wood’ she draws a swoosh with a fin and a slanted-stroke end, possibly like a submarine with its periscope up, above…what looks to me like a crowing rooster with a Mohican.
“This means ‘home’. If you break it down it means ‘pig under roof’. This is a reflection of China’s agricultural traditions, of course. If you travelled out to rural areas you might have seen the animals, the pig, in with the family, in the house, under the roof.”
I love the cosy density of this interpretation, the feeling of earthy warmth and family resources held close. Of the expats I know, most say it takes a couple of years to feel comfortable speaking Mandarin but that it’s too easy to not learn to read or write it, especially when iPhone apps auto-complete and auto-translate words so easily. For each word I’ll have to learn the pictogram and its multiple components, the Chinese sound associated with it and a phonetic transcription of the sound in English, along with whatever prompts or story might help me remember write the characters, so ‘home’ doesn’t say ‘pig under roof’ so much as ‘rooster with Mohican under submarine’ to me.
“You can start by learning a few of the main radicals,” the journalist advises.
It’s good to study a new language and feel that part of the brain twang and deepen, resist and absorb. Despite the language barriers my expat friends have all told me they felt at home in China after a year or so. I hope that when I arrive, I too will feel pig under roof.
The journalist studied at university in the UK and often returns there. I meet her when she’s in London for a few weeks doing some property-related business and chopping through a new Chinese embassy procedure regarding a visa. “They have changed the regulations,” she says – a phrase which arises in every conversation about official Chinese matters. China’s megalith of bureaucratic stipulations shifts on its hinges every six months. Whatever the requirements once were, whichever documents had to be submitted, whoever was required to receive the submission, the criteria will have changed since the last time anyone checked, and will change again shortly. Despite this, I’m impressed the my multiple exceptions, get-outs, grey areas, dodges, skives, middle-people and allowances which makes things easier in such an apparently rigorous, unbending, totalitarian system: a tightly controlled society is always loose at the edges.
“We were brought up by my grandmother who was so kind. Perhaps she was a bit picky about her food, but that was because food had been so scarce. But my father was very selfish. I remember he would fight with us, fight his own children, to get to the food. That is one of my memories. But I still pay his medical bills.”
The journalist lives in Beijing with her two clever, cosmopolitan and gifted half-English daughters, both of whom are planning on studying abroad.
“At the international school, they can be so racist. The other students say to my younger daughter, ‘Oh, you look so Chinese. We can tell that you’re foreign.’ And so she’s developed this idea that to be Chinese is somehow inferior. But she’ll grow out of it. At the school, she surprised them all by giving a mock TEDx talk – on feminism. And it completely took them all by surprise.”
“Tell me, what can I do for you when you come to China? Do you need a place to stay? My place in Beijing is empty at the moment,” says the journalist. She’s already been so generous, greeting me with a gift of an exquisite black silk bag.
“It’s okay. I’m staying with my friend Peaches.”
“Where?” asks Lijia.
“I’m not sure. The…Chaoyang district? The cool one?”
“That doesn’t mean anything. The Chaoyang district is so large it takes one hour in a car to drive from end to end.”
“I’m going to have to get used to living in a city of 21 million people, which is constantly growing. How many ring roads are there by now? London’s small by comparison.”
“So you don’t need an apartment. Do you want to be introduced to people? I can invite you to lots of things. And if you don’t understand what’s going on I can translate. You can come to lots of women’s events. We can fire them up. Get everyone to mobilise.”
“More than anything I want to get to know Chinese people, not just expats.”
“That is the difficult thing. Even I live halfway between the expat life and the Chinese life.”
“And I want to learn Mandarin.”
“To speak it, or to read it too?”
“To read.”
“I’ll teach you two words. So, here we are, drinking tea.”
On my notebook she draws three characters stacked tight on top of each other: a long dumbbell with a cross-bar at either end; a collapsing chair, side on; a crucifix with a tick of a tail and two wing-flicks.
“The top one is the character for grass. And you’ll see, if I draw the traditional symbol for it,” she draws two neatly forked sprigs, “it looks like grass. The middle one is the sign for a person.”
“I recognise that.”
“And the bottom sign is the sign for wood. So tea is ‘a person between grass and wood.’ It evokes the idea of tea leaves but it also represents the Asian mindset, or should I say the Chinese mindset, of a person in relationship with nature. And do you know the word for ‘home’?”
Just under ‘person between grass and wood’ she draws a swoosh with a fin and a slanted-stroke end, possibly like a submarine with its periscope up, above…what looks to me like a crowing rooster with a Mohican.
“This means ‘home’. If you break it down it means ‘pig under roof’. This is a reflection of China’s agricultural traditions, of course. If you travelled out to rural areas you might have seen the animals, the pig, in with the family, in the house, under the roof.”
I love the cosy density of this interpretation, the feeling of earthy warmth and family resources held close. Of the expats I know, most say it takes a couple of years to feel comfortable speaking Mandarin but that it’s too easy to not learn to read or write it, especially when iPhone apps auto-complete and auto-translate words so easily. For each word I’ll have to learn the pictogram and its multiple components, the Chinese sound associated with it and a phonetic transcription of the sound in English, along with whatever prompts or story might help me remember write the characters, so ‘home’ doesn’t say ‘pig under roof’ so much as ‘rooster with Mohican under submarine’ to me.
“You can start by learning a few of the main radicals,” the journalist advises.
It’s good to study a new language and feel that part of the brain twang and deepen, resist and absorb. Despite the language barriers my expat friends have all told me they felt at home in China after a year or so. I hope that when I arrive, I too will feel pig under roof.