Life

So after my last post’s introspective ramblings I thought it would be nice to introduce you to our lives here, now that we’ve been here 3 months (!) and are feeling a bit more settled. Life is unbelievably cosy and comfy here, to the extent that I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, I’m sure  we’re  supposed to be freaking out at some point? But aside from a bit of feeling sorry for ourselves during and after we all had the flu (I have a new test for the flu, it used to be, according to Anna Spencer, if you can get a £20 note from the end of the bed then it’s just a cold, not flu. Being bed-ridden to that degree is not an option when you have two poorly girls to look after as well but we thought that ordering a home delivery of mushroom soup from a café approximately 50m away is probably our proof that it actually was the flu!), it really has been pretty easy to settle in. 

We’ve found Shanghai to be a very easy city to be in, it’s really easy to get around, it hasn’t been too much of a headache to find vegetarian food, everyone we meet is extremely helpful and whilst language is obviously a barrier, it hasn’t been so intimidating that we haven’t wanted to have a go. The Chinese hanzi characters that are everywhere are inscrutable but  beautiful so that every street sign and price tag is a little work of art, it will be a long while before we can understand what we see but in the meantime we have something nice to look at! The wet markets are stacked full of delicious fruit and veg, some more familiar than others, and a frankly thrilling array of tofu. We could also buy as many live turtles, fish and toads as we wanted but we’re not really into that. I can buy dragonfruit, mangosteen and longan at the end of our street and get a free Chinese lesson thrown in and Jos can buy a pizza anytime at the slightly controversial Pizza Marzano (more on that another time) across the road. The street food is cheap and delicious and I’ve settled into quite a routine with it: tofu and mushroom noodle soup from the stall next to the market; Chinese cabbage steamed buns from the bāozi stall over the road when we’re hanging out at home; extremely naughty and not even slightly vegetarian xiaolongbao (juicy steamed buns) or sticky fried dumplings from Yang’s when we go downtown; yau char kwai (bit like a Chinese version of churros) for Saturday breakfast when I remember to go out for them early. I didn’t really plan on making this post all about food! Shows where my priorities lie though…

So enough about stuffing my face, let me introduce you to someone special…

Ayi Wang

Before we came here I had serious reservations about the whole ayi thing. Ayi means ‘auntie’ in Chinese, she (almost invariably) is basically a cleaner/housekeeper/nanny/ cook/ dogsbody who many ex-pat and also Chinese families employ on a full or part-time basis to help around the house. Hiring an ayi didn’t really sound like the sort of thing a feminist socialist human being should be getting into. What we read on ex-pat forums didn’t make us feel any better. Ayis’ wages are pretty low and the attitude of their employers was often horrendous. The language used to describe these women who work so hard is so often dehumanising and all very ‘them and us’. The sort of thing that would have Edward Said turning in his grave. Or more likely, nodding sagely and saying I told you so from his grave. However, when in Rome and all that…Our neighbour came round and said that her ayi, Wang, was looking for some extra work, she’d been with her for 7 years and that she had experience with kids as well. Wang charges a fair bit more than we had anticipated which is frankly a relief and we’re really not anywhere near house-proud enough (as anyone who’s actually been to our house will testify) to justify paying someone to clean every day, but we decided to try out proper ex-pat living and give her a go.

We needed someone to be available for childcare so that I can work or do some volunteering and so that we can occasionally go out in the evenings, someone to help us with household things that we didn’t understand like bills, maintenance etc , someone to speak Chinese to the kids, someone to be in loco grandparentis, and someone to be an extra Important Person in the girls’ lives to make up for being so far from everything they know. Someone to be, well, an auntie, to all of us.

And as it turns out, hiring Wang has been one of the best things we’ve done since arriving in China. Of course it’s nice to have a tidier, cleaner house and I do get off on having the beds being made every day (for me this is the true test of whether or not I’m a grown up, if I start making my bed every morning then it will finally have happened), Jos and I are useless at housework (I’d like to think it’s down to something my dear friend Susie once said about her own skills in that area – ‘I’m an intellectual, I’m no good at housework!’ – but I think it’s actually that we’re just bone idle) but the most gratifying thing is the (admittedly nascent) relationship we have with her. She and Cass have fallen for each other hook, line and sinker, and Cass is now better at saying her numbers in Mandarin than English. When Cassie was ill last week she was as attentive and caring as if she really was her auntie. Cass looks for her as soon as she gets back from nursery, Wang is an expert cavorter with a lot more stamina for peek a boo etc than I have ever had! We have a pleasing little language exchange going on (so far very one-sided) and she cheers on my attempts to get to grips with Mandarin. She’s just a really lovely woman who keeps me sane by keeping me company and just like that we have someone in Shanghai that we’re never going to want to leave.

We're surrounded by lovely people and there are always people around. I have sometimes found staying at home with the kids to be quite an isolating experience. Don’t get me wrong, my kids are great company and I am fully aware how lucky I have been that I haven’t had to work whilst they are small (or to put it another way that there was no job I could get that would have covered childcare costs with enough left over for it to be worth leaving the kids for!), and we found plenty to keep us busy but it could be lonely at times. So I find it wonderful that Wang is around for a couple of hours a day and that there are always kids with their parents, ayis or some other random adult playing outside and that we tend to bump into the same people every day on the walk to and from school who always want to say hello, tell me how ‘piaoliang’ (beautiful) the girls are and gently scold me because they don’t have enough layers on, or their hair needs cutting or they don’t have adequate protection against the three drops of rain that have just fallen. I certainly didn’t anticipate that we would come to live in the world’s largest (by someways of reckoning anyway) and 4^th tallest city and so quickly find such a warm and relaxed community to slot into. 

So this post was supposed to be a lot more about the neighbourhood we live in, school and how the girls are doing but I got a bit carried away so more on that next time...

Not in Tottenham anymore

So here it is! Our blog finally exists. The delay was mainly due to not being able to come up with a name for it that I liked. I wrote the following post a couple of days after we arrived when we all a bit unhinged with jet lag and when we were living in our temporary hotel/apartment. Jos or I will write something more up to date soon

All the things that are difficult now about Shanghai, that seem strange, ridiculous or unpleasant we should treasure because one day we will be leaving them behind. They are the things we will tell our friends when we return and our grandchildren when we are old. They are the things that will form the parameters of this experience. All the things that we miss from home are the everyday things we have grown used to over 35 years and that we will go back to and absorb into our lives once more without a thought. A policy: for every 1 thing that jars or makes me begin that thought ‘I wish I were at home’ I’ll come up with 5 things that will make me miss China. So today its ‘ I don’t know how to see a doctor if we need to’ vs the incredible friendliness of pretty much every Chinese person we have met, supermarket aisles full of noodles, having delicious vegetarian Chinese food delivered to our room, watching t’ai chi in the park, the dislocation of jet lag that allows your mind to roam around time and space it’s not usually active in.

Obviously having the girls with us magnifies the feelings of dislocation and plain old shock. Because they are so little and I feel quite heartbroken that I’ve taken them away from the friends and family they love and the life they are used to, I find myself anticipating all sorts of culture shock on their behalf. Cass has pretty much been a feral rat since we got here, roaming around at all times of day and night and occasionally coming up with heart spearing statements like ‘I want go home, I want go my little house’.

In her essay Street Haunting Virginia Woolf has this to say about home and leaving it (in her case to roam the streets of London on a winter evening on the pretext of finding a pencil):

‘For there we sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experience’

And:

‘The shell–like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye’.

These were the exact reasons we wanted to come here, our shells have cracked and we’ve emerged pink and vulnerable and blinking our enormous eye wondering what shape we will make for ourselves and our family here.

All the things that are really incidental or environmental, that you wouldn’t think twice about if you were on holiday somewhere become weights in the balance of whether or not this place can feel like home. Noise from the traffic, not being able to see any trees, no tea-towels, crap heating provided by air conditioning, the lack of a decent loaf of bread, somehow assume the same significance as other far more important features of our new home such as the unerring friendliness and grace of the Chinese people we have met so far. I’m missing our little house and its homely housiness, its shabby charm that was shabbiness we had created by living in it, the evidence of our occupation and of its holding our family within it was there in every room, it was the mark we left on the world. Now we don’t have a mark or a trail, we’re floating, feels like we were magicked into this place. And in a way we were for what else is air travel if not the magic power of being catapulted 40,000 feet in the air at a speed of 500 mph for 12 hours. That’s not a trail that can be traced by the human eye or memory, in the scheme of a life it may as well be teleportation. We have been here two days! Do I think too much? Perhaps, let me ponder that for a while...

Since I wrote this we’ve moved into our lovely apartment in a really fantastic neighbourhood and are all feeling much more settled and Cass is no longer asking for her little house. More on that next time…