by Fiona Wright
At Lunar New Year each year, it’s expected that people return to their homes, to their families, from wherever it is that they now live. This year, 385 million people moved around China at this time – it was, the newspapers all said, the largest human migration of all time.
When I first stand in Shanghai’s Hongqiao Station, from which all of the inter-city trains depart, it’s busy, but nowhere near capacity. It’s a huge, square room, the size of an aircraft hangar, cavernous and echoey. I stand, for a moment, against the railing on its mezzanine, holding the largest small coffee I’ve ever seen – it’s taller than my hand is long – looking out over the rows of plastic seats, the queues snaking from the turnstiles. I stand there, and I think: it’s hard to feel significant.
No-one else is here alone.
The Chinese word for hometown is lǎojiā (老家), and it’s often translated as ancestral home, because, on its own, the character 老 means old, and 家 means home. But 家 also means family – perhaps unsurprisingly, in a culture where connection to one’s ancestors is another kind of rootedness, another way of knowing one’s place in the world.
But Shanghai is many people’s lǎojiā too; there are so many people nostalgic for this city, just as there are so many people within this city nostalgic for other places, other homes. There are the people who speak, still, of Shanghai’s golden age, that brief period between the city’s opening up to international trade and the two wars, first international, then civil, that brought its flowering (this is the kind of language that they use) to an end. They never mention that this opening up was forced, a condition of a series of brutal treaties signed at the end of colonial trade wars, they never mention that in this period, half of the city was controlled by the half of a per cent of the population that were European merchants and entrepreneurs, that the city was riddled with opium and prostitution and gamblers and gangsters, that it was here, against these conditions, that the Chinese Communist Party was first born.
So many wealthy Shanghainese, as the Japanese and then the Communists advanced, fled their homes here for the special zones of Hong Kong and Macau, for Taiwan, and were never able to return.
A woman, a writer and historian, who grew up as part of this diaspora in Toronto, tells me her family’s old home is still standing. But there are almost a hundred people who live in it now, she says, not just my one family. Not just one family and their sixty-something servants.
I don’t know if it’s just a longing for lǎojiā that keeps this image of jazzy Shanghai, the Paris of the Orient, the adventurer’s paradise, so strong in people’s minds. On packaging – of lollies, cosmetics, tourist trinkets – and on postcards everywhere there is the image of the Shanghai Lady: a beautiful, hand-coloured woman posing against the background of the city, the image always blending East and West: she’s wearing the traditional qipao, but also holding a tennis racquet or guitar. She’s glamorous and liberated, cheeky and demure: she’s a chimera, and a Western fantasy.
Perhaps the dream is one of lost wealth, lost opportunity: Shanghai has never been so prosperous, so expensive, as it is now, and those who left also left behind properties and possessions now worth millions. Perhaps it’s just the dream of the displaced. Or perhaps the dream is for a China that was never torn apart, that didn’t convulse its way through the twentieth century in so spectacular and terrible a fashion, leaving so many dead and ruined in its wake.
At a university a writer tells me that he wrote a book called Shanghai Ladies, because men are better than women at writing about women, because men can see women for who and how they really are. A student asks me, do you think readers can tell that you’re a woman? and I think he thinks that this is something I should strive to overcome.
The next day, I sit and write in a café that I love because of its enormous, brass-framed windows that look out over a bus stop, continually unloading school children who sing as they run down the street and office workers clutching steaming plastic bags filled with pillowy mántou and fried dough sticks; I love it also for its endless reggae playlist. I overhear a man, clearly Australian, addressing his small son: look, he says, your mother’s very emotional. But when you’re a man you can’t be emotional, do you understand?
I read about a family from Hubei, near the centre of the country, now being relocated for the third time in fifty years. Their original, Ming-era village was relocated in the 1970s to make way for a reservoir, then this new village was relocated again when the walls of that dam were heightened barely thirty years later. Now, they’re being moved again, as part of the huge South-to-North Water Diversion Project, essentially an irrigation project, moving vast volumes of water from the fertile south to the dry northern regions of China.
Each time, the family has been compensated. Each time, the village’s name and government structures have been retained. But what has been lost, each time, is arable farmland, and the knowledge of how to work it, access to the odd jobs and small industries that many rural people rely on to subsist. All of this, but also something more ineffable, something more to do with home.
I read that elder residents of the area say that the reservoir ‘destroyed the local feng shui’ and so ‘nobody of note has been born’ in the area since.
I read that the Party plans to relocate ten million people over the next two years, for massive infrastructure projects like this one.
I don’t have an old home, I don’t have an ancestral home, I don’t think any white Australian does. My parents’ house, my first home, is still new: it is barely three years older than I am. It stands, furthermore, on someone else’s ancestral land – that of the Dharawal people, from whom it was forcibly stolen only a few generations ago. I don’t know from where my forebears come, and I’ve never been especially curious about this. But even still, it’s not an old home, or a family home, that I’m missing here. It’s my new home: that small world that I have built for myself in rented accommodation on the fringes of a city also gripped by rapid change, also slippery with great wealth and even greater inequality. It’s the small intimacies and interactions of my everyday there, the hot bread and takeaway coffees on my back patio on weekend mornings, the glass of wine and bowl of popcorn on the couch after a long weekday, the dog dashing to the door to greet me whenever I have been away.
I find a set of scales in my apartment and immediately wish that I hadn’t.
In Shanghai, I’m living in a studio apartment, on the top floor of a building that was constructed in 1935, in the middle of that golden age. It was built for a hotelier and businessman whose family had made their fortune in the opium trade, and who designed two grand buildings for this city: this one, shaped like an S, and a hotel, shaped like a V, these two letters, his initials, stamped forever on this place.
There are two clanky lifts with worn vinyl floors and I’ve never once been in them alone. There are women so old that they’re curled to two-thirds of my height, a schoolgirl who meticulously folds the red Party scarf that she wears around her neck. A man carrying a plastic bag filled with loose eggs from a market, another with two huge baskets of white flowers and a white bichon frise on a lead. Some days I step out of the lift and the women from my neighbouring apartments are arguing, pointing their fingers at each other’s chests, while one of their husbands silently waters his plants with a spray bottle. Some days I step out of the lift and there are men snoring on rickety sun lounges half-in, half-out of their front doors. One afternoon a fish head is strung up beside my door to dry, dripping viscous liquid onto the floor.
Inside this building is a police station, a hairdresser, a food delivery service, an informal kind of homecare for the elderly. There are stray cats that skulk around the stairwells, and curl up to sleep on the engines of electric scooters, plugged in to sockets along the back courtyard walls. There are deliverymen with cardboard parcels bounding up and down the stairs. There are CCTV cameras in every corridor.
In the first week, I short out the power by turning on the kettle at
the same time as the heater, and then do it again with the heater, the shower and the bathroom fan. I stand in the freezing corridor, wrapped in my towel and shivering, while I fix the safety switch. Two neighbours watch me, and do not say a word.
I never feel alone here. I feed the sparrows on my windowsill with crushed-up crackers and send text messages back home, where other lives are continuing without me.
My mother sends me a video of my three nieces, the baby wearing rabbit ears on a headband, the two older girls singing out, almost, but not quite, in unison, Happy Easter Aunty Fi! My housemates send me a video of my dog in the park, chasing a bright orange ball that they’re throwing, again and again, and yelping in delight. A friend sends a photo of an Easter brunch, with hot cross buns and chocolate eggs and champagne watered down with orange juice. Each of these things so simple, each of these gestures so silly and small. But my heart aches, each time, it pangs a little.
Down the escalators to the train station, a recorded voice repeats three short sentences, over and over again, and I hear them, over and over again, every day for five weeks, but still cannot distinguish properly the words. Aside, that is, from xiao xīn, little heart, which I also see written everywhere, although it takes me a month to realise that this must mean caution: take a little heed, take a little heart. (This was what I loved so keenly in this language – how poetically its abstract nouns are put together). Every day my laptop bag is run through a security scanner in front of the ticket gate. I don’t think the city workers would quite stand for that at home.
The character for heart (心) is startlingly anatomical – that curved organ, those arterial valves that branch out into the entirety of the body. The character for heart was being written like this hundreds of years before anyone in Europe ever dissected a human heart. The character for heart used to be part of the character for love (愛) – many characters are built by layering up other, simpler characters, which hint at how they sound or what they mean. But when the Communists simplified the written language, they removed the character for heart from the character for love, and replaced it with the character for friend (友) – because comradeship is more important than the heart, more reliable even in matters of the heart.
I know one poem in Chinese, from that year I learnt the language at university. One year is no time at all to learn a language, one year is enough to learn to talk about the weather or list basic facts about yourself, to ask for a wine or some tea or to use the toilet. One year is enough to learn how to say, I’m sorry, I don’t understand, and I only speak a little bit of Chinese. I can count, and I can swear.
I can’t remember why our teacher showed us the poem. Perhaps because by that stage we could read most of the words, perhaps because every Chinese child can recite this one by heart. Perhaps because in Sydney she was so far from her home:
床前明月光 Chuáng qián míngyuè guāng
疑是地上霜 Yí shì dìshang shuāng
舉頭望明月 Jutóu wàng míngyuè
低頭思故鄉 Dītóu sī gùxiāng
It’s a Tang dynasty poem, by Li Bai, sometimes known as Li Po, the poet who drowned one night while trying to catch the moon’s reflection in a pond. It’s a poem about homesickness, about nostalgia: a travelling scholar sees moonlight falling on the floor of his rented room, he looks up and out the window, and the moon he sees there makes him think of home – this is, after all, the same moon that his family, his friends, his neighbours, may well be seeing, lighting their fields so far away.
I can’t see the moon in Shanghai. The nights are too neon and the smog too thick. Across the river, one of the skyscrapers flashes white and red: I ❤ SH. Another glows purple and pink, and looks extra-terrestrial.
When I meet new people here they add me to their WeChat by scanning the screen of my phone: each person has a QR code, rather than a username, and this makes sense in a place of so many people and so few surnames (the Chinese use the term laobaixìng, 老百姓, old hundred surnames, to refer to the common people, at least in part because the 100 most popular surnames here are shared by eighty-five per cent of the population) but I can’t shake the discomfort that it causes me. I know it isn’t more invasive or data-hungry than any Western social media, I know that Western social media is far from apolitical. But the government here makes no secret of the fact that they are monitoring WeChat, rewarding people for calling their parents frequently, penalising them for playing too many video games. We know Facebook has been experimenting with engineering social and political behaviour: maybe the Party here is just more honest.
Whenever I tell people I’m uncomfortable with this they say, there’s 1.4 billion people in this country, they’re not going to worry about you or me.
It is hard to feel significant.
One afternoon, I walk in and out of half a dozen bakeries, just looking at the breads: matcha loaf, cream cheese and mulberry loaf, walnut and longan loaf, coconut bun, adzuki bean bun, sausage baguette. I walk in and out of half a dozen bakeries before I realise what I’m doing, that my body is trying to tell me something, that my body wants bread. Sucks to be you, body, I think, and then, oh, but it didn’t do anything to deserve this.
I buy a triangular bread roll (does triangular bread roll?) covered with pork floss like pale hair for the man camping out on the footbridge that crosses the creek next to my building because I can’t stand the thought that he might be hungry.
One of the bakeries on the Bund is run by a hatted chef whose signature dish is a caviar parfait, garnished with gold leaf and shaved black truffles. Another is famous for its little French cakes, its rows and rows of ingot-shaped financiers.
One Saturday I walk through People’s Square, the largest public garden here, because I’m craving green space, here amongst all of this concrete, all of this air so thick I sometimes think that I feel it in my pores. There are paved paths that wind around a lake, an artificial waterfall, rows and rows of cherry trees that are budding, but not yet in bloom. The paths near the lake are lined with middle-aged women and men, sitting behind open umbrellas, with posters bulldog-clipped to their top edges, the top-most character on each, on a line of its own, saying either WOMAN (女) or MAN (男). Of the rest, all I can read are numbers – years of birth, heights, weights, salaries. These people are parents and grandparents, trying to find partners for their unmarried relatives. Some of them are also knitting, some of them are also selling snacks. They swap phone numbers, and eye me suspiciously. Most of the people they are match-making are younger than me. Often, I’m later told, these parents are acting without their children’s knowledge or permission.
Salaries, I read later, are important because there’s a concept here that partners should have ‘matching gates and matching doors’ (門當戶對). A matching outlook, that is, but I love how this is expressed through the structures of a house – because there’s little that speaks so eloquently, if often subtly, about class than a home.
My generation of women here are marrying late, or not at all, and it’s perplexing and alarming to their families and the media. Perhaps, they say, they are too educated, too ambitious. Perhaps they are too prosperous. Perhaps they have too much choice.
The unmarried women here are referred to as ‘leftover’ – the same leftover (剩) that gets used for unwanted food.
The legal marrying age in China is twenty. The age of consent is fourteen.
My friend who lives here says the white men in China are even more awful than the ones at home, because they get treated like they’re as special as they already assume themselves to be.
I keep meeting white men in China who tell me, it takes a certain kind of person, a special kind of person, to come to China. I hear this again and again, and when I finally lose patience and ask, does it, though? a tall, blond man from my hometown says, without missing a beat, well, it’s not Bali.
A Chinese friend I meet says that she’s taller and smarter than all of the men here and they don’t like it. A Canadian f
riend who lives here says she’s smarter and richer than all of the men so why would she bother. I say I’m very independent, and a little bit intimidating. At least, this is what I’ve been told.
Each time I talk to a group of students, one of them always asks, why did you write about your sickness? In China, they always say, nobody would do this.
In China, I always think, you literally air your laundry on the public street.
The students that I visit say, Miss Fiona, will you write about China? A writer who I visit says there is a maxim here: if you stay in China for a day, you can write a book, but if you stay in China for a year, you can write a sentence. My heart contracts, turns little in my chest.
It’s a small part of the city that I start to map out in my mind, connecting metro stops and main roads by walking between them, finding grocery stalls and the convenience stores that stock Diet Coke (they’re few and far between), the post office, the bank. I’m embarrassed that this corner is mostly in the old French Concession, the foreign part of the city, the unreal, ex-pat part of the city, but it’s where the coffee is (you Australians and your coffee, an American writer scoffs) and it’s beautiful too: the streets lined with old and gnarly oaks, bare and spectral when I arrived here, flush with leaves by the time I’m done. There are old, grand buildings with carved stone facades and cantilevered windows, as well as mad coils of electrical wiring noodling on their corners, pots of dusty geraniums by the doorsteps of the laneway houses tucked back from the streets. And it’s slower, just a little, calmer, just a little, and just a little more familiar some of the time.