Edges Magazine Issue 24: My Time In China

EDGES MAGAZINE Issue 24

January 2001

MY TIME IN CHINA

Dominic is a member of our team. At the moment he is studying law and works with us in our Reconcile Project, providing support in the evenings and at night to our clients in drug rehabilitation. He shares with us his experiences of China.

A few years ago, I spent two years in China studying, travelling around the country, learning the language and teaching English. I was privileged to see many interesting things and the whole experience broadened my mind and gave me a different perspective on life. I visited the Great Wall of China, the Forbidden City, the tomb of Ghengis Khan and many other places, from the wealth and modernism of Hong Kong to the poverty and backwardness of Tibet. Not all my experiences there were positive however. I saw racial hatred against black people and the Japanese. I saw whole streets of Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, filled with brothels. I saw the mentally ill, filthy, begging in the street, often almost naked. I saw countless old women, their backs bent right over so that their eyes faced down, worn out by a life time’s labour. I met many middle-aged people who had been sent away from their home and family to do hard labour during the “Cultural Revolution,” their only crime being that they were “intellectual” and therefore a threat to the ruling communist party. There are many things, walking around the streets of any Chinese city that assault the senses. The smells are strange, the heat is oppressive, the endless flow of thousands of people stuns you, and the ceaseless movement and energy of the whole country exhausts you. I ate snake, dog and sparrow. I was woken daily at dawn by military music rousing school children for their morning run, and I went on bus journeys lasting 30 hours.

It is almost impossible to describe China, no matter how much you write because you seem to experience the life there deep down inside of you, with your guts rather than with your eyes or ears. Trying to make sense of the contradictions and frustrations you encounter there can be a thankless task. A good example of how frustrating life in China can be is buying train tickets. I was living in a city called Tianjin in north China, only about two hours away from the capital, Beijing. I had been travelling in the south of the country for about a month and was fast running out of money and needed to get back home as soon as possible. There was a train from the city I was in up to Tianjin, which was my only option, as I did not have enough money to fly. Unfortunately, it was a very busy city, filled with migrating agricultural workers, travelling on trains to find work. I arrived at the train station on the first day at about 7.00am and was faced with queues at every one of the twenty or so ticket windows of up to a hundred people in each queue. The ticket offices did not even open until 9.00am, and the forecourt of the station was also packed solid. Anyone caught queue jumping was yelled at and kicked out of the queue by other ticket-buyers. A little later the station police arrived who dealt with any disorder by jabbing the offender in the face with an electric gun, probably giving a shock similar to that of an electric fence. Although neither the police nor the other Chinese would dare touch me as a foreigner, I did not feel happy about joining that noisyexpanse of angry people and went back to my hotel. I returned the next day at 6.00am, but the situation was no better. On the third day, I joined forces with a French man I had met, and we arrived at the station at 4.00am. We then realised that we were completely out of our depth trying to buy tickets this way, as the Chinese simply slept on the station floor, and as they travelled in large groups, they took it in turns to queue, buying ten or twenty tickets at a time. We then resorted to a method which I had used before but did not like. There are gangs of tough youths at most stations who will offer to buy your tickets for you at a price which often means you pay double. They simply kick and punch their way to the front of the queue , threatening anyone who stands in their way. They are not pleasant people to have to deal with, and you get your ticket at the expense of other people , but you do get to where you need to go.

If I left my account of China at that, the reader may get the impression that it is a harsh, unjust and nasty place to be. Fortunately this is not the case. I cannot even begin to count the times I was shown friendship, acceptance and support from Chinese people. I once stopped a man to ask for directions to a certain street, and he insisted on taking me back to his parents’ house for a meal after I told him that I was looking for a place to eat. The children at the school I taught often invited me to their homes. Everyone always had time to stop and speak to you and ask you about England and what you were doing in China.

There are perhaps two things that I came to realise during my time in China. The first is that, compared to many people in this world, I have had a privileged and luxurious life. From some of the situations I have mentioned above, it can be seen that Chinese people often have to put up with conditions that would probably cause a revolt if they were reproduced in England today. However, they rarely complain about having to queue for days to buy tickets, or greater problems such as the lack of a proper social security system or criminal justice system. There is the imposition of the one-child policy and widespread infanticide and abortion of female children; severe restrictions on freedom of movement, both within the country with regards to “residence permits,” and to foreign countries, which is all but impossible for the majority of the population. Instead they “eat bitterness,” or they just put up with it and see their hardships as a test that they will overcome and will make them stronger. It may seem incomprehensible to someone from the West who has had a privileged upbringing that anyone should tolerate certain things, but the Chinese have had to put up with a great deal of suffering in recent past. In the 1950’s, between 20 and 30 million people starved to death because Mao Zedong, the all powerful leader at the time , told the farmers to stop producing food and to make steel instead to help industry leap forward as he wanted. The steel was all thrown away as it was too poor quality to use. In the 1960’s, the “Cultural Revolution” divided communities and families, encouraging children to report to their teachers and even their parents to the authorities who would then be beaten and imprisoned for “political” wrongdoings, often completely without any evidence. The fact that someone else’s suffering is greater than your own does not make you suffer any less, but it does help you put it into perspective.

The second thing that I came to realise in China was that people deep down are the same no matter where they come from. In Tibet, they sometimes have “sky burials” of their dead, which means that they leave the body on top of a hill for the wild birds to devour. Whilst this may seem like a bizarre ritual to us and is very different from a Christian funeral, the grief that a Tibetan family will feel on the death on the death of a loved one is identical to the grief felt by an English family. In fact, the Tibetan funeral is done in that fashion at least partly for practical reasons. There is very little fuel on the Tibetan plateau so they cannot easily be cremated. Being so high up, the ground is often frozen so they cannot be buried, and, unless they were buried deep, the birds and animals would eat them in any case . There seems to be few options for disposing of bodies. Another example is to be found in a common Chinese greeting. Whilst the English are famous for chatting about the weather when they can think of nothing serious to say, the Chinese talk about food. Often, instead of greeting a friend with “hello,” they will say, “have you eaten?” Although this is just a custom, it is a reminder that all people have certain basic needs, which are the same no matter what their nationality.

It seems to me that travelling and meeting people from different cultures is a great tool for widening your knowledge and can help you to bring about positive changes in your own life by copying new things you have seen. However, I think that you can learn all the important things about human society and where you as an individual fit into it, in your own country. If all human emotions are the same, and money has the same effect wherever you go, as does hunger, bereavement and everything else that makes up a human life, there is no need to travel to find out about those important things. The “Dao de Ching” is an ancient Chinese book which was supposedly written by a wise man around the 4th century B.C . In one chapter it says, “Without stirring abroad one can know the whole world; without looking out of the window one can see the way of heaven. The further one goes the less one knows.” To me, this seems to be saying that we have all we need already. Gathering new experiences is exciting and interesting, but may get in the way of understanding what really matters in this life.