by Fiona Wright
This way of thinking about my illness, I later realised, is remarkably similar to that which underpins the social theory of disability, a concept first delineated by disability activists in 1983. This theory sees disability not as a medical problem, not something that needs to be fixed or cured (or pitied), but as a condition that is only the result of living in a world – a physical world, a social world – that doesn’t or can’t accommodate or understand aberrant bodies and brains. It doesn’t focus on trying to treat or change diseases and conditions (because they’re natural and immutable, like gravity), but on addressing the barriers that make working around them difficult. A wheelchair user (to use the most obvious example) isn’t prevented from catching a train by the fact that they can’t walk, but by the stairs that make getting to a station’s platform impossible (and still, only fifty-four per cent of Sydney’s train stations are fully accessible).
In a way, I’ve been living like this for years: meeting friends for a coffee or a drink, rather than a dinner, managing my work conditions (and my workload) so that I can work mostly from home, and according to rhythms and routines that suit me and my body, planning most of my outings and essential chores for the morning, before my energy peters out mid-afternoon, frequently leaving functions early when I’m too anxious or unwell to stay the course. It’s just that I always thought that I would one day give these compromises up, move past them, be unimpeded in the world; and what I’m coming to accept now is that I can no more do this than go against gravity and fly.
Even still, this flies in the face of so many of the ways we’re taught to think about health and illness: I have an uncle who used to list his problems and then say, but at least I have my health, as if this offset everything that beset him; an aunt who would advise us, if you don’t have your health you have nothing. Fighting as hard as I did for as long as I did was driven in no small part by ideas like this, ideas that devalue any life that isn’t unencumbered. I don’t have my health, but I also don’t have nothing, and the things I do have I have fought hard for, and cherish all the more for that hard fact. And gravity, I keep thinking, may well slow us down, but it also keeps us tethered to the ground.
LITTLE HEART
I didn’t expect, before I flew to China, that one of the things I’d encounter most often here would be glimpses of my teenage self, that younger, healthy self I try not to think about too often now that I’ve left her so definitively behind. But I had forgotten that what I’d called my ‘long interest in China’ in my residency application really dates to my last two years in high school, where we’d studied Chinese instead of European history, and my first year at university, that pivotal year, where I had, as a result of this, learnt Mandarin. I’d loved these lessons, loved the way that the language had such a different grammatical and syntactical structure than English, how differently it expressed things like the division of space and time, how it made me realise, for the first time, precisely how much language affects the way in which we think about ourselves and our world, especially in that year when these things – who I was, and how my world worked – were suddenly so difficult for me to apprehend. In that year too I know that I found a kind of solace (the nerdiest kind) in the rote learning that the language required, writing out characters again and again and again, working in order not to feel. My interest in Mandarin was obsessive – I’ve always had this tendency – but it was also passionate and focused and excited, the kind of excited that’s untinged by anxiety, that I almost never experience any more. It was less than one year later that I fell ill.
From the moment I arrive in Shanghai people keep asking me, is this your first time in China? and I keep saying, I’ve wanted to come here for years, but for some reason never made it.
Except I know the reason. I know it very well.
Every time a piece or phrase of language comes back to me, I remember my adolescent self. Every time I encounter a bright-blue soft drink, or a street stall selling slushies with some kind of dry ice in the bottom that makes them billow smoke around the faces of the girls who drink them, I remember her: she would have loved these. Each time I see a statue of Mao or Sun Yat-sen.
I keep thinking: when I was an adolescent, the idea of being ordinary terrified me. And now it’s all I want.
The first thing that I notice in Shanghai, the first thing that fascinates me, is that public space is used so differently. The first day that I walk the streets here, to start to place myself within the city, to get a sense of how it breathes and feels, it’s a sunny day, though cold and smoggy, and there are women on the street hoisting bamboo poles onto any structure that will hold them: the metal frames that are fixed beneath their windows specifically for this purpose, but also tree branches, bus shelters, decorative trellises. There are long-sleeved shirts stretched out along the bamboo, the poles running the length of their sleeves, underpants pulled taut over clothes hangers, all of this damp laundry flapping in the wake of passing buses. There are women gutting small fish in the gutter with rusty-looking scissors, another washing dishes; one man shaving with a hand-held mirror. There are older men standing stock-still on street corners, and rotating each of their joints in turn. In the parks: groups of men grappling together in some kind of martial art, a woman singing along to a portable speaker, her voice clear and high and wavery, couples in sharp, black trousers waltzing slowly in silent pairs.
In the days that follow I see a woman holding her baby, pantsless, over a rubbish bin, so that he can urinate directly into it. A toddler poop directly onto the footpath, squatting beside a telegraph pole on a main road. A huge block of tofu left out to ferment in the sun. There are street sweepers everywhere, men and women in navy-blue coveralls, holding brooms made of rushes and metal dustpans on long poles. The streets are always spotless.
Public space here feels more public, because it’s always being used. There’s always, that is, a public on it, in it: it feels shared, rather than shied away from. Many of the houses open out into shared laneways and courtyards. Many more have front rooms that have been transformed into kitchens, with stacks of bamboo steamers wider than my arm span over vats of water, or enormous crepe pans jutting out over the windowsill, onto which steamy-faced women layer eggs and shreds of meat, spring onions and pungent sauce, for the office workers meandering past – they never hurry – every morning. The houses themselves are small, I later realise, and often sub-divided between several families: it’s unheard of that anyone would live alone. Many of the older buildings still retain their idealist, communist architecture – shared kitchens, communal bathrooms, conjunct laundries.
Public space here is more precious, I think, because the private barely exists.
In Shanghai, I forget to stand on the right-hand side of escalators. I forget to throw my toilet paper into the bin and not the bowl. I lean on walls when I wait on train platforms and in the elevator, but no-one else does; I fold my arms beneath my chest instead of clasping my hands at hip-height. I leave too much space between my body and the next one in the queue, so others assume that I’m not waiting and squeeze in front. I smile too much at strangers, rather than just nodding, and they must think I’m not all there. I say xièxiè so much that it’s impolite.
I don’t spit phlegm into the gutters. But I do vomit there, every now and then, and on more than one occasion it’s because I’ve had too much to drink.
China is a modern country, the writing students that I visit tell me. China is a developed country. China is not the developing world. They tell me Shanghai is a world city, Shanghai is an international city, Shanghai is a Tier One City. The expats tell me, Shanghai isn’t China.
There are as many people living in this city as in my entire country.
Some nights, I lie on my mattress in my little studio, ten storeys up, watching the city lights blink on and off, stretching further than I can see, further than I know I will visit in my time here. Some days I walk in crowds so dense that I just have to let them carry me. I think of how I
stride at home, how I weave around the people moving more slowly. I relax here: I just have to let them carry me.
Most days, I walk along the Bund in the late afternoon; some days, the smog is so thick that the buildings on the other side of the river – the enormous glass skyscrapers, one shaped like spheres on a stick, one shaped like a bottle opener, one the second-tallest in the world – look like someone has tried to paint them over, off the canvas. But on the days when the sun is out, and the air relatively clear, young women pose before the sandstone buildings, in pristine white trousers or flowing, net-like skirts, leaning backwards and casually tossing a handbag or a jacket over their shoulders. Nearby, a suitcase or a wheeled shopping bag, full of changes of outfit, extra accessories.
Most afternoons, there are couples in their wedding outfits being photographed here too, although it’s not their wedding day, not yet – the photography is a production in and of itself. Sometimes the bride’s dress is clipped to her body with bulldog clips, sometimes she wraps a blanket around her body in between takes. There are always people holding portable lights, someone fluffing the veil to make it look like it is rippling in a breeze. One afternoon, a couple is posing in their wedding gear right at a bus stop, leaning over the rail and licking matching ice-creams, and not at all suggestively.
The streets near where I’m living are the commercial heart of the city. Each day I walk past enormous shopfronts, Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci and Versace, with enormous screens playing video footage of tall, tall people tossing their pale heads down catwalks. My closest supermarket is in the basement of a megamall and I walk past L’Occitane, L’Oréal, Lancôme each time I buy my vegetables and watery imported cheese. I’m surrounded by things I can’t afford (not that I want them), and this is not what I expected.
I don’t know what I expected.
A week in, I go to Uniqlo because it’s colder than it should be and I don’t have nearly enough winter clothes. I find the thermal shirts, the ones I wear in Sydney, although here they only come in black and white and red, and riffle through the racks, looking for my size. A man comes over to assist, and I point, and say, dà, zhōng, xiao, big, middle, small. He nods, and I ask, xiao-xiao? even though I’m not sure if that’s a word. Méiyou, he says, don’t have, and first I think they’re out of stock. But as I wander around the shop looking at jumpers and thermal tights I realise that my size doesn’t exist here – because I’m not extra-small here, I’m just small.
I try on jeans that list their leg-length as ‘full-length Asia’. The length is perfect. I’ve never bought a pair of pants that I haven’t had to re-hem.
One week in, I catch the bullet train from Shanghai to Beijing and watch the countryside whizz by my window. There’s an American man sitting next to me, tall and with enormous feet, a square jaw that looks almost cartoonish. We grin at each other and nod, and then he pulls a book out of his bag. ABSOLUTE VICTORY, its cover says, WHAT BUSINESS CAN LEARN FROM THE WAR IN IRAQ.
This too doesn’t seem like my world.
The countryside is mostly flat and grassy, although there are occasional hills in the distance that I imagine I can see sculpted into rice-paddy terraces, but I know I’m probably making them up. What I can see, intermittently and always suddenly, are blocks of huge apartment buildings, each easily twenty or thirty storeys high, arranged in grids in the middle of nowhere: five buildings wide, six deep, each building exactly the same. There could easily be a thousand people living here, surrounded by blank countryside on all sides.
I mention this to someone in Beijing, and he tells me that the government has dismantled many old-style villages, claiming the coal that they were fuelled on was too polluting to keep them operational. He says the villagers were compensated with these brand new apartments, with central heating, new appliances, wi-fi. But, he says, they couldn’t take their chickens with them. I think what he means is, they couldn’t take their way of life.
Much later, someone tells me that these buildings may well be uninhabited, that there are ghost cities scattered all over China, built on speculation, never used, empty and alone.
I arrive in Beijing during the Nineteenth Party Congress, and it’s all that the diplomats and cultural attachés I meet there can talk about. It’s a fascinating time to be in China, they all say, China is a country in transition.
On the morning that the General Secretary is unanimously re-elected – a few days after a vote was passed to extend his office term beyond the legislated ten years to the length of his life – I’ve stolen a few hours to go to the Forbidden City, the ancient palace complex in the centre of this place. It’s cold, barely one degree, and I’m wearing a padded goose-down coat that’s not my own, fur-lined gloves and an ear-flapped hat, all borrowed from a woman much taller and broader than me. A man asks for my passport at the ticket office and scans it into a machine. He takes my photograph. Two other people scan my passport into machines before I walk through the gates.
The Forbidden City is huge, much vaster than I had imagined, some of the pavilions regilded and restored, others dusty and decaying. The crowds are immense, and I soon learn to jostle for position so I can peek into the rooms, to push my way to the front of viewing platforms. In a courtyard, I ask a group of four women if they could take my photograph and they exclaim at my Chinese, though it’s a phrase I looked up on Google Translate, and I cannot understand what they are saying in response. They pull out their selfie sticks and pose beside me, pulling off my hat so they can point to my red hair. Minutes later, it starts to snow, and I take off my gloves so I can touch it. I’ve never been in falling snow before, and it seems magical, ethereal against this backdrop.
That afternoon, I’m in an embassy van on the way to a reading, and one of the staffers tells me that it hasn’t rained – or snowed – in Beijing in over 100 days, that in the old days people would think that the General Secretary had broken the drought, having a direct line to the heavens like his imperial predecessors. Maybe they seeded the clouds, her colleague jokes. When we arrive at the bookshop and shake the snow from our coats, the owner comments on it falling to the floor, and says it’s probably cloud-seeded. At the end of the event, my driver says, did you hear that they made it snow? And at dinner, someone declares, the snow is definitely artificial, because it was wet and not fluffy.
I wonder if this is how rumour becomes fact here, where you cannot get real news.
The pollution index used in China isn’t the pollution index used elsewhere. If it were, there’d be hardly a day where the air qualified as ‘good’ or even ‘fair’. The rules here are different: a day that would be labelled ‘very poor’ in Sydney is only ‘moderately polluted’ in Beijing.
Some women wear smog masks with kitten muzzles embroidered onto them, their very human eyes with thick mascara blinking above. Some smog masks are made of the thin paper of hospital gowns, and come in pink and blue. Some men wear thick white smog masks, rubbery-looking and curled over their ears, and with their white wireless headphones sticking out beneath them they look almost cybernetic.
I buy myself a Mao jacket. I buy it at H&M. I’ve wanted one of these for years.
Back in Shanghai, I go by chance to a mixer for young, professional women, held on the terrace of the restaurant hosting my residency. I end up talking to a woman named Lily, who has moved here from a northern city, a place so cold, she tells me, that you have to wear your phone around your neck, against your chest, or else the battery freezes solid. She’s moved here to start a fitness business, a chain of gyms and personal trainers, and from where we’re standing we can see joggers, pairs of women in baggy t-shirts and tennis shoes, bouncing along the Bund. This is a new thing in China, she tells me.
Prosperity breeds joggers, and pet dogs: the tiny brown poodles I see everywhere, often wearing trousers, or miniature shoes.
Lily tells me that when her father’s house, the one her family had lived in for generations, was requisitioned recently by the government to make way for a new
freeway, he stole the lintel from the front door and spent the next months carving it into a musical instrument, following tutorials on YouTube. Instrument, the word she uses, so non-specific I can’t quite imagine what kind it might be, let alone what songs it must strum.
China’s new prosperity – its Economic Miracle, as they call it here – has both depended on and brought about a process of rapid urbanisation, of huge-scale displacements from home. In 1949, the year that the Communists took power, barely thirteen per cent of China’s people lived in cities – the revolution, after all, had been a revolution of the peasantry, because the proletariat was simply non-existent. Now, the urban population is something close to fifty-nine per cent, and its fastest growth – almost a doubling – has occurred over the last twenty years. Beijing grew by forty-four per cent in the ten years between 2000 and 2010; Shanghai by forty-one per cent in this same time.
But as well as people who moved permanently to the cities, a massive ‘floating population’ of low-skilled workers from rural regions also makes up these numbers – around 245 million people, known mostly as ‘migrant workers’. These people are often living far from their homes, from everything and everyone that is familiar; but also far from their hùkou, their official household registry, which gives them access to government services like healthcare, housing and schooling. They mostly work in manufacturing goods for export. They live in tiny dormitories. They make Disney toys, and iPhones.