Beijing Tai Tai Read online

  I met my neighbour at a local coffee shop today and when I told her about my ayi ‘issue’, she laughed so hard, cafe latte nearly squirted out of her nose. A veteran of nearly three years in Beijing, she thought my story was typically ridiculous. She reminded me that I’ve just spent six months reconfiguring our Aussie life to fit awkwardly into the template of a life in China, husband and two kids included. No wonder I’m emotional.

  Then she said something that has changed everything for me. She said I’m forgetting Ayi is actually—here’s a thought— being paid for ironing our small mountain of clothes and folding our smalls. Paid. It’s her job.

  To hammer the message home, my coffee-spurting friend kindly pointed out that my ayi has a Good Job. I mean, a really good job. In a country where much of the population work too many hours for too little yuan, Ayi has a good job. In a lovely, temperature-controlled apartment, with light duties and using quality equipment (she’s using a very good German iron designed to be easy on bird-like, sixty-odd-year-old wrists, after all).

  My face lightened when my neighbour pulled these facts out of the Beijing smog. I smiled. I’m not imprisoning or debasing this woman after all. I’m sort of looking after her.

  Good, saintly me.

  So, this afternoon, after my totally private conversation at the café, the oddest thing happened. Ayi moved her ironing board from our living room (where her presence so tortured me) to the small storage room located at the very back of our apartment, with the board games and the cleaning equipment and the change of clothes she keeps there. Feeling bad about it (and admittedly, quite suspicious), I told her she could iron in the living room but she told me the light is better in that tiny room (it isn’t) and that she likes ironing in there (how could she?).

  Hmm.

  I’m off to frisk the jacket I wore to the coffee shop.

  Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

  The never-ending attempt to shine surfaces

  When you come to Beijing, it’s not only the flavour of the air you have to get used to. It’s what’s in the air. And what’s in the air (among other lung-paralysing things) is dust. Fine, powdery, silt-like, greyish white, pervasive, insistent Beijing dust. This stuff is so insidious, you could find it on the inside of a can of tuna. Indeed, it has been found on the inside of many a perfectly sealed package in our house, so you can imagine its presence on the inside of our lungs, eye sockets, arteries and perhaps even filling our hair follicles.

  Right now, my house is Bizzaro Dust World. Any self-respecting housewife would run in terror at such a pervading presence in her home, particularly since this substance requires a bare minimum of four hours to resettle on every shiny surface (and most particularly the television screen). Four hours. Yes, you read it right—a dust-settling timeframe that takes four weeks in Australia.

  Where this dust comes from is questionable. The shockingly rapid rate of development in Beijing at this very minute, as I type, is barely short of implausible. As the hutong courtyard houses crumble into piles of brick and high-tech Taiwanese shopping centres pop up as though pulled by strings, the building sites alone cause enough dust to cement the bowels of hell. Then there’s the outer reaches of the Gobi Desert, inching closer and closer as the planet is twisted and skewed and pulled from pole to pole as we heartlessly screw with its ecosystems.

  The northern belt of China was recently touted by a British newspaper as the most consistently polluted stretch of land on earth. Beijing factories (which have all been evicted to the surrounding countryside) are churning out more produce than ever before—quite a feat considering China is already the world’s leading manufacturer of anything and everything. Local production of cars is growing exponentially and vehicles are entering the streets of Greater Beijing at an astounding 1000 units per day. Coupled with the fact that the steering, accelerating and halting of vehicles is not a mastered art here, and gridlock, here we come.

  The origin of this all-pervasive white soot, then, is probably insignificant when compared to the prevailing questions: how to deal with it, and how to keep as much of it out of our lungs as possible.

  So what to do? You wipe. You have to. And closing windows and cupboards won’t protect you, my friend. If you use a feather duster, the silt will fly into the air and resettle on the walls of your bronchi within the half-minute. So you have to wet wipe (or have Ayi do it for you). Then you have to do the same thing again the next day and the day after that. If you leave a photo frame one week, your beloved family member will go into soft focus. If you leave it a month, it will look like it’s been sitting in a be-sheeted mansion for 25 years.

  Air filters, cleaners and humidifiers are supposed to ‘help’ with the dust. Whether they actually do anything is negligible, but it can’t hurt to try. Humidifiers wet the air and weigh the dust down onto furniture more quickly; not so good for the furniture, but helpful for keeping lungs pink.

  This morning I leaned against the window of our high-level apartment and feasted my eyes on the swirling white muck, grey-scaling down through the atmosphere and onto the streets below. It creeps down to the pavement. It lingers with the people. It turns your hair dull in hours. It dries out your skin and cements the walls of your gut.

  My God. What are we doing to our kids?

  Christmas in June

  Our stuff has finally arrived!

  I’m loving our apartment. We were allowed to choose our paint colours—the living room has a chocolate wall and a mint wall and a cakecoloured wall. I could make dessert with our walls, they’re so yummy. There’s loads of space and we can now fill up that space because ... drum roll, please—our stuff has arrived from Australia!

  It’s been like Christmas unpacking it all. Ayi has a permanent, gawping look on her face and ceaselessly tells me we brought far too much with us. If you call eight million books too much, then it’s too much, I suppose. There were several uncertainties about coming to China and one of them was the English-language book selection, so we are well prepared, that’s all. Our family reads voraciously, and frankly, books cost a lot to ship, so we stocked up. And up and up.

  We also brought every toy we owned so the kids could grow into and through them, as well as four massive cartons of food: breakfast cereals, Milo, Aussie chocolate and other snacky things we weren’t certain could be found here. We brought a few sentimental items, too; things I couldn’t bear living four years without. Like the kids’ baby books. Our scrapbooks and journals. Framed photographs of family and friends. That kind of thing.

  So, it was like Christmas opening all the boxes. Suddenly our life feels more real. We’ve got more of an anchor to help us connect with our new life here because everything still feels surreal. I’ll be walking past the window and I’ll look outside at the massive cityscape below and I’ll just sort of gasp quietly as though it’s only just materialised there. It’s so easy to become cocooned inside the shell of expat living and forget where you are.

  Oh my. We’re living in China.

  Cycling Beijing

  The bold and the brave

  We may be nuts, but we’ve purchased new bicycles with kiddie seats attached to the back ... and we live smack-bang in the middle of a ravenous city, right between two major, knock-’em- down-like-skittles roads. Of course, we have bike helmets for the kids and we use the bicycle lanes (also frequently frequented by motorcycles and cars) so I’m sure we’ll be fine. Eeep!

  I have a very loud bell, which I use constantly, and the kids—who seem to have an inbuilt desire for thrills— love it. They love it when Dad and Mum race to be the fastest (it’s always Dad). They love watching Beijing whiz past without having to walk in the heat. They love the bumpity bumps in the road. I’m sure they love the physical agony Mum endures after a particularly long bike ride in this stinking heat, too.

  Oh, it’s luxury being a kid!

  But, of course, parents are fools for love and we wouldn’t have it any other way. We’ve been out and about on these bikes every weeke
nd and even nipping out in the evenings to our local haunts for dinner.

  We were, of course, stupid enough to buy good bikes—top-of-the-range. This means we need to buy a bicycle lock that costs the equivalent of a security guard’s monthly wage. Just our luck that one of the few petty crimes that occurs in Beijing is bicycle theft. As a result, we park our bikes (with Fort Knox locks) in full sight of wherever we dine.

  The one time we left the bikes out of eye-shot for about ten minutes, we returned to see someone had attempted to free them from their Fort Knox locks. Clearly frustrated with their failed attempt, the wannabe thieves decided if they couldn’t have the bikes, they’d make off with my removable basket. Not the sharpest knives on the block, they failed to notice the easy-release mechanism and instead, probably in a flying panic, forced the basket right off the frame. This did naught but break the mechanism and leave the basket hanging loosely from the bicycle like a broken bottom lip.

  Very annoying.

  So we’re nervous about the bikes now. I’ve not once taken mine shopping for fear I’ll come back to a vacant space and a gently dangling lock.

  Nonetheless, we’re totally enjoying riding the bikes for fun rather than transport per se, and we’re getting to know The Jing’s warren of streets even better as a result. There’s nothing more luscious than scooting through the soon-to-be-razed hutongs near Sanlitun Lu, kicking up a breeze, darting through the dappled sunshine. Just lovely.

  And having wheels is also lovely because it makes us feel that little bit closer to feeling welcome—to feeling we’re not just tourists on a quick jaunt; that we are living here now. And even though we know we could never assimilate into a country like China, it will be great to feel even a teensy bit local.

  A Mother’s Day

  The Taipan experience

  Without wanting to come across as pitiful, we left behind a challenging part of our lives in Australia. You probably know all about it: huge mortgage, two small kids, a mother who chooses to stay home rather than work, a life far away from family and hands-on support, the mind-bending price of disposable nappies, among other consumables. There was many a night when Xiansheng and I wrung out the last drops from the foil bladder of a cask of wine (then inflated it and used it as a football; cheap wine does that to you).

  Like many expats, coming to China has provided a wonderful opportunity for our family to have, well, a little more. The cost of living is low, the cash flow is good and the lifestyle easy. Let’s just say that we are kind of like sugar-deprived kids in a well-stocked candy store.

  On top of this, my role as a mother back home was pretty much all-encompassing. Although it wasn’t always easy, I wouldn’t trade a minute of it because I was blessed to stay home with the kids in their formative years. Like most mothers, however, I lost a large part of myself when I became a mum. That part is still there, it’s just deeply stashed behind the needs of Everyone Else, and although we’ve only been in Beijing a short time, it’s been rather exciting to see that young woman, with a fresh face, bright eyes and bouncy hair, peeking out from behind the ratty, exhausted carcass I dragged over from Australia.

  So, when Mother’s Day came around, it was with dedicated excitement that I slipped out of the house, at Xiansheng’s insistence, for a pampering session at Taipan.

  Taipan is quite simply a place you need to frequent if you want a too-good-to-be-true treat. From the orchid-studded wooden walkways to the dimly lit, be-curtained rooms, scented candles and smiling provincial girls with a knack for kneading, this is just heaven for the harried mother.

  After I had changed into my little cotton shorts set and ordered my freshly pressed pear juice, I succumbed to the incredulous goose-tingling stress-release that is a Chinese massage.

  There really is nothing quite like it. The pressure points, the kneading, the rolling, twisting, pushing ... grinding elbows and forearms and fists into constricted muscles. The cupping, flicking, striking that sucks the blood up to the skin’s surface like a rouge-daubed sponge. It is one of the most wonderful things you can put a human body through, and the experience was very overwhelming for me, especially after many, many months of pent-up stress and angst.

  When my too-short hour was over, I lay delirious on the massage table in my crumpled shorts set like a rag doll after one too many mocktails at the Toy Inn. I waited until the masseuse left, then I lay in that beautiful, darkened room for a few precious minutes, and wept my heart out.

  It really is the simple things that count, and mothers are so good at appreciating them. A massage, a cup of tea, a hug, a card with buttons stuck to it, a butchered breakfast served up sloppy by the kids. Sure, it’s tempting to flaunt diamond-bare earlobes in the weeks before the event, but it really is the little things that make the heart toasty.

  My most treasured Mother’s Day gift is the small dry-mount photo album Xiansheng gave me on my very first M-Day, with black pages and slippery rice paper between each sheet.

  Each year, I carefully paste a photo of myself with the kids inside this book, and it’s such a precious memento of my motherhood. It’s also mildly confronting. I’m not sure I want to watch myself shrink, grey and crinkle over the next 45 years, while my babies grow into tall, spotty, hairy, potentially smelly creatures. Indeed, my husband tortures me by suggesting the trace notes of baby smell still pooling in the crook of my two-year-old son’s neck will quite soon be replaced by sweat, pimples, and God forbid, hair.

  Being a mother is, of course, a process. It’s a journey of the years and an entity of many incarnations. It’s something that grows and shifts and moves over time, and each year brings with it a new challenge and a new beauty.

  So, regardless of how old or smelly your children are, when M-Day dawns far too early for respectable eyelids to open...

  When the house-husband and scurrying-mice kids batter their way around the house in an attempt to be inconspicuous...

  When you smell the burnt toast curling in under the door crack...

  When you blindly reach for pillows to prop yourself as a child-propelled tray heads towards you, with slopped tea and dismembered fruit...

  When you sip the sloppy tea and the love infused in the brew reaches your toes...

  When you tear-up over the card made with smudged crayon and decorated with mismatched buttons...

  When you giggle and coo at the homemade presents of sagging clay pots and long-forgotten Pokemon cards wrapped in tissues and bound with sticky tape...

  When your daughter reads you a poem that wraps around your heart...

  When all of these things happen, you will realise that nothing is better than this. This is as good as it gets. And you wouldn’t want more.

  Well, except maybe that massage at Taipan.

  Acrobatic Marvels

  How do they do that?

  Every country has its thing—often several things—and for China, one of those things is acrobatics.

  Having a general aversion to anything too ‘touristy’, we headed off to Tiandi Theatre with mixed expectations. How impressive was this really going to be? A bunch of skinny work-whipped sad-sacks dressed in yellowing leotards, leaping for pennies? It was kind of awkward going along to see this—a bit like the feeling one gets when visiting an under-funded zoo. But boy, were we in for a surprise.

  The show was wonderful. Performed by the China National Acrobatic Troupe, even Riley (not yet two-and-a-half years old) was mesmerised. We sat three rows from the front, our heads resting back, our mouths hanging open with wonder. And what was our favourite? Almost impossible to choose.

  Was it the gorgeous bird-like girls with a single feathery plume spouting from the tops of their heads, flinging diabolos around on strings, tossing them into the air and catching them with absolute precision and perfect timing? What about the fact that they danced and kicked their legs like burlesque flamingos at the very same time?

  Was it the young boys in gold leotards who projected themselves dart-like through flimsy, bespan
gled hoops and scaled 30-foot poles like monkeys, only to fling themselves down the poles again, coming to a halt with their chins poised just millimetres from the ground?

  Was it the woman who juggled a young boy with her feet? Was it the eight-year-old who rode a unicycle on a high wire? Was it the fifteen or sixteen (I lost count) women who piled onto a single bicycle and rode around and around the stage, stacked and fanning outwards like a peacock tail? Was it the two teens who juggled and bounced twenty balls in a hailstorm, their hands ablur as they walked up and down a staircase? Was it the archetypal girls tossing noodle bowls onto a lofty stack with their feet, or balancing stemmed glassware on their foreheads while performing back-cracking contortions? Was it the young men flinging themselves around underneath a series of seemingly motionless straw hats like crazed, gravity-defying scarecrows?

  Or was it the young woman, whippet-thin and constructed entirely of sinew, balancing atop a long pole, slowly meandering her limbs around her head in a pretzel-like fashion? The strength and flexibility had our eyes watering.

  So, I’m happy to say we were more than impressed by China’s acrobats. The costumes were lush and spangled. The sets and lighting were visually saturating. The music was compelling and the acts were indeed breathtaking.

  Frankly, I can’t wait for our first round of visitors so we can go back again. And again. And again.

  Market Mecca

  Where do I begin?

  I feel a little embarrassed talking of my first Beijing market shopping experience. And it wasn’t to the famed Hongqiao Pearl Market, Silk Market or Ya Show, no no. It was actually to the Tianyi market in the east of Beijing, with several very seasoned Beijing shoppers who knew a thing or two about ... da da de daaaa—wholesale! (Collective gasp, please.)