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…