Beijing Tai Tai

by Tania McCartney

  Unlike a regular tatty market stall, Ling Ling has always offered the tai tai dream in her slick store on the fourth floor of the legendary Hongqiao market (the Pearl Market to tourists). When I first went there, I stayed four hours. I bought ropes of pearls, rose quartz, Swarovski crystal, onyx, turquoise, topaz, smoky quartz, citrine, jadestone and agate for the price of one piece of designer costume jewellery in Australia (and it would probably be plastic costume jewellery, to boot). One piece.

  I remember feeling a little stunned when I walked out of the store, dragging what felt like bags of lead but instead actually contained semiprecious treasure. Owning these baubles was beyond my wildest dreams, and considering most of these gems cost around 5 per cent of their value at home, you could say I had a rather large Princess Diana moment.

  I may not be dripping in diamonds, sapphires and emeralds like Princess Di, but this semi-precious bling is still enormously valuable to me because I adore each piece. And isn’t real value held in how much you love something, not what price it would fetch at auction?

  What a treasure trove we are living in.

  Market Fatigue

  Could I be getting over it?

  I know this is hard to believe, because I can hardly believe it myself. In fact, I don’t even know if I want to write it aloud, but here goes:

  I think I’m getting tired of Beijing’s markets. There. I said it.

  Market shopping in Beijing is a true shopper’s Nirvana. In classic market shopping-style, the pattern goes like this: you arrive in Beijing and buy everything, and one in every colour, too. You even buy rubbish you don’t need, including lots of kitsch Beijing knickknacks like little mirrors, magnets, cards and danglies for your mobile phone and the mobile phone of everyone you know.

  After a certain period, you start to get more discerning. You still buy a hell of a lot, but you stop buying the handbags because they’re so cheap and start buying ones you really actually like, even if they cost a bit more. You also start looking for more interesting items like ‘antiques’ at Panjiayuan dirt market, artwork and good quality clothing and fabric, like real silk and real cashmere.

  A certain period after this, you kind of get tired of buying altogether. Firstly, your house gets too full of junk; and secondly, you’re sick of the mental and emotional exhaustion of a market trip. The thrill of the hunt is still there but the marketeers are starting to get stuck in your craw.

  You are over the intense strain of the bargaining process. You are over the tiresome sales pitches spun into some sticky, touristy web. You are over the drain on your time. You are over the ridiculous start prices and the claptrap that comes along with them. You’re over the drama, the conning, the duping, the shoddy products and the whole sorry business. You are more experienced, you know the price, you’re not a tourist and you’re sick to death of repeating this, ad infinitum.

  So you just— sharp intake of breath—stop shopping. And if you actually need to shop, you wait until you have an endless list, then you strap on your skates and tear through that market like a tai tai tornado.

  That’s where I am now. I’m a hurricane. ‘Mei you shi jian, mei you shi jian!’ I cry, as I twirl through five floors of copy handbags and ‘cashmere’ pashminas. ‘I don’t have time! I don’t have time!’ And I don’t. And, ironically, it seems to be a great bargaining strategy. The pressure of the sale becomes intense when your time is limited, and everyone wins because they get a quick sale and I get to zoom in and out of that market in the time it takes to order a cappuccino.

  Put it this way: I never thought I’d tire of the market experience, but I have. And exhaustion is not the only reason, for I now have more wonderful things to focus on. I’m writing again. Really writing.

  And if this keeps me away from the markets, it can only be a very good thing.

  Hair Horrors

  White/bleached hair looks bald

  I have already spoken of hair in Beijing, but alas, not all hair stories are happy princess-ending ones. Hair lovers, get ready for a horror story.

  Firstly, here’s some advice. No matter how many times they insist they can colour your mousey hair, never ever trust the Chinese to lighten unless they have had twenty years’ experience in London or Melbourne. No exceptions.

  So, when I recently became sick of that fetching yellow glow that comes with too many home bleachings, I succumbed to a local hair stylist’s insistence that he could make me Marilyn Monroe platinum proud. Like a fool, I was led into the peroxide lair. This stylist is such a sweetie, after all, and foolish me tends to trust sweet.

  Chinese hair needs eleven parts bleach to twenty parts peroxide and four hours to lighten even a whisker of a shade. Western hair, especially lint like mine, needs one part bleach to no peroxide, and three-and-a-half minutes—total.

  That considered, when this lovely stylist and his two helpers began streaking my hair with foils, all seemed to be going well, if not a tad slowly. After almost 40 minutes of agonising application, my troupe disbanded, leaving me with a band of hair around my face, untouched by bleach. I hesitated. I stewed. Then I just had to say something. I told the stylist he needed to put colour around my hairline otherwise I would end up looking like an inverted skunk.

  He acquiesced and used a small brush to paint tiny stripes all the way around the hairline. I should have known better. I should have called him on it because my hair takes to peroxide like vodka to the liver.

  But I trusted. Oh, the blonde fool.

  You know that feeling when ants are crawling under your skin? For 25 minutes I itched, I pulled at my hairline, I scratched away the colour. It went from orange to butter yellow almost instantly. I was panicked. I squirmed until I was pink in the face. Then I begged for a wash and tore to the basin and revelled in the bleach schlooping down the drain. I prayed to all the hair gods, I begged and pleaded.

  It was all in vain.

  When I approached the mirror and my Smurf turban was uncoiled, I clutched at my gaping mouth. Oh, horrors of horrors. Tress terror horribilis. Revealed was an adequately blonde head all right, but all the way along my hairline was a one-inch band of hair so bleached, so translucent, it was like there existed no hair at all. I was Queen Elizabeth I incarnate. All I needed was a powdered face, a concertina collar and a crown.

  I left. I got up and I left. I was polite about it. I said I could fix it at home (I couldn’t), I said I would be okay (I wasn’t) and I pretended it was all good (far from it). I got up from that seat and I ran home. I ran. I cried. Pathetically. Then I put on a hat and I spent five-and-a-half hours in cabs, scouring Beijing for any box of hair colour other than Black, Ink, Charcoal, Onyx, Ebony, Soot, Slate, Raven, Pitch or Jet.

  Of course, I failed.

  I bewailed to the heavens somewhere near Sanlitun Lu: ‘Where is the blonde, the butter, the champagne and beige? Where is the ash, the caramel, the honey?’ Even the local expat supermarket had nothing lighter than Magenta. I was horrified.

  At 6p.m., I trailed back into the salon and begged them to fix it. ‘Zai zhe, wo mei you tofa,’ I said. ‘I have no hair here.’ They agreed. They dyed the whole lot brown, including my Elizabethan strip.

  I’m no longer blonde, and we shall never speak of this incident again.

  Star Day

  The wondrous mechanics of multiculturalism

  The great thing about being an expat in Beijing is that you’re not only exposed to China when you live here. Things are not only Chinese. Things are Japanese, Korean, American and French. Things are Spanish and Greek and South African. It’s multiculturalicious. If you want a worldwide culture bender, all you need to do is live as an expat in Beijing.

  Since arriving in the capital, our family has celebrated a traditional North American Thanksgiving, enjoyed an Argentinean birthday celebration, worn demon masks during Japanese Setsubun, trick or treated for candy in our first ever Halloween, decked ourselves in green for Ireland’s St Patrick’s Day, cheered on horses during Australia’s Melb
ourne Cup, queued for traditional Christmas candles at the German Embassy, and sampled a global symphony of authentically cooked feasts courtesy of neighbours and friends from all over the world.

  It’s been a multicultural joy and I can’t imagine going home to Australia one day without taking many of these wondrous celebrations along with us. Especially Star Day.

  Celebrated on the seventh day of the seventh month, this beautiful Japanese tradition—Tanabata—was introduced to us by our very dear friends from Tokyo. It involves a bamboo tree and lots of beautiful paper decorations and colourful tags to dangle from the tree, just like Christmas, only on these tags you write poems and wishes that you want to come true. A real-life wishing tree!

  The kids were agog at Tanabata. They loved the paper-making, the folding, the tinsel and pretty paper. They loved thinking up fandangled wishes (Ella wished for a kangaroo, Riley wished for candy) and writing them neatly on their tags. They loved decorating the bamboo by stringing curling swirls all over its lime-green branches. And they loved placing the bamboo by the window where the moon would see the tags and transport all the carefully scribed wishes to heaven.

  There’s something inherently wonderful about tradition. There’s a familiarity in it, yes, but there’s also magic. When my Japanese friend told me she wished for a maid during Tanabata two years before arriving in Beijing, it was with a goosebumping gasp that I turned and looked at her ayi, stirring the pot for dinner. Two years on, she had received her wish.

  Quickly, I rushed over to the tree and put another tag on the branch. My first tag had said: ‘I wish my family health, happiness and success, always.’ On the second tag, I wrote: ‘I want to be a successful author.’

  Fingers crossed!

  On Writing

  Dragging it out and dusting it off

  Speaking of writing, I began a children’s book this week. Actually, I began three children’s books because I have three separate story ideas and I can’t decide which one to do first.

  You see, I adore children’s books. Always have. And having my own kids has given me so much inspiration—daily inspiration, in fact, and a constant supply of tales from funny to fantastical. I just couldn’t resist penning the tales, and Xiansheng even enjoyed them, though he did say the ending of the third one, called All the Tea in China, didn’t quite cut it.

  It annoys me when something doesn’t quite cut it, so I dropped the manuscript, which is pretty typical of me. My entire writing life has been like this, in fact. I go full force and achieve quasi success, then give up if the going gets prickly. This has left great walloping writing holes in my résumé, usually filled with flight attending or marketing or desktop publishing. Then when I start writing again, I’m starting from the back of the field. Call it fear, call it a lack of confidence, call it what you will—I know this about myself and I’m frustrated enough to admit it.

  So, I’ve dropped All the Tea in China but I’ll work on the other two manuscripts instead. Living in Beijing and having access to home help and hence so much extra time, I’d be crazy not to do more of what I love. I need to write like I need to breathe, so why haven’t I been breathing?

  I just wish the markets and lunches and coffee and mahjong and visits to obscure places with my girlfriends didn’t get in the way. It seems the more I do these things, the more I realise how decadent they are. Wonderful, sure, but also indulgent and a little bit time-wasting.

  And does anyone really have the luxury of wasting time?

  Potential Psychos Are Everywhere

  Are our kids as safe as Beijing houses?

  Living in Beijing is like having access to a safe house. I don’t think I’ve felt more comfortable anywhere in the world, and with a society that reveres kids and collectively fights to protect them from a comparably low level of predators, things also look good for our children here. Indeed, inhaling too much dust or being skittled by a wayward vehicle is probably the biggest worry our kids face on any Beijing street.

  As a result, the freedom you can give small children in this town is probably a little more lax than other places on the planet. But there are still limits. Dumping a toddler in a café for fifteen minutes while you nick off shopping is probably not the wisest decision. You can imagine my horror, then, when I recently witnessed an expat woman do just that.

  After a pointed finger and some whispered instructions, said woman disappeared, leaving her small daughter on a café couch, halfway between me and a Chinese woman. The mother had obviously gone to get a coffee and a toddler treat, but after five long minutes, the eyebrows of the Chinese woman rose into her hairline to match the position of my own.

  I turned and scanned the café. Then I asked a nearby waitress why the child’s mother was taking so long to get her coffee, but the waitress simply scratched her head and said, ‘Mama? Mei you mama.’ No mum.

  The Chinese patron and I stared at each other. Then we started asking pointless questions that, of course, no one could answer, least of all a two-year-old who spoke a language neither one of us could put a dent in. ‘Hui shuo Zhongwen ma?’ we cautiously asked the child, ‘Parles-tu français? Speak English? Deutsch? Parlo italiano?’ All pulled blank stares.

  My Chinese compatriot and I were stumped. Then the child started getting restless and began rolling around on the floor under the table. We continued to quiz her and the wait-staff, but alas, no one knew where Negligent Mama had gone.

  This went on for another ten minutes before Mama finally breezed back into the coffee shop. The Chinese woman and I looked at each other pointedly then busied ourselves with our work, but my cheeks were flushed. My throat was constricting so tight around a massive lump of expletives and parenting opinion that my ears were turning purple.

  How could I not say anything? China or no China, relatively safe or not, how could this woman disband her toddler and rely on the kindness of strangers to take responsibility for her baby while she nipped off for a spot of bartering? Who reasons in this way? Who? Psychos?

  Being unable to focus on my work, me and my bulging throat and puce ears decided to leave. I packed up my things and edged past Neglectful Mama’s table, but not without bending cleanly from the waist and hissing some pointed but very calm observations about her parenting skills. She stared at me as though I was a vigilante psycho.

  Then I straightened and left. I slipped into a cab and I shook so hard, my teeth rattled. Was it from the adrenaline rush of giving her a serve? Was it because of the totally negligent position she had placed her daughter in? No. It was the numb reaction she gave me—almost a shrug, a half-smile and an ‘oh well’ look. Let’s just hope my comments reminded her that no matter where you are in the world, potential psychos are everywhere.

  Even vigilante psychos.

  Problem Ayi

  Furen gets narky

  Golly gee, am I possibly the most intolerant furen in Beijing? Am I the only tai tai who doesn’t really like her ayi?

  I know the cultural differences—goodness knows I live with them each and every day. I know the hot/cold thing. I just nod with numb tolerance when Ayi says it’s blowing an Arctic gale in the kitchen when it’s really just blowing a smooth ribbon of cool that gets all but lost in the suffocating heat of our steaming kitchen.

  I know the ‘I didn’t do it’ thing where Ayi will blame a recent glass breakage on a visiting neighbour or a mysterious gust of wind rather than cop the rap on the chin. (I have repeatedly told her that breakages are fine with me, whereas weaselling out of responsibility faster than a rat on a bagel is NOT.)

  I know the discrepancies in thought patterns between the East and the West. I know it all. Doesn’t mean I understand it. Doesn’t mean I have to like it. I tolerate it, sure, but sometimes it gets to me. And sometimes it really gets to me.

  The bottom line is, this is my home. Our home. It is the place we can strip off our layers and reveal our inner skins, our foibles, our flaws, our warts. It’s where we can let down our guard and totally relax and e
njoy the freedom of having things our way.

  The moment we step outside our front door, no matter where we live in the world or what culture we live in, we have to fit in. We have to compromise and empathise and consider those around us, lest we desire anarchy. In our home, we can eat dinner in our underwear, stick our fingers up our noses to the knuckle, forget to flush the toilet (highly anarchistic) and stare at cartoons all day long if we really want to. We don’t even need to speak, let alone try to ingratiate or charm anyone.

  In our home, we live a life that is comfortable for our family. We have our traditions, our needs, our likes and dislikes, firmly established over decades of sharing. We like fresh air and cool nights. We like sunny windows and soft music. Sometimes we even like pumping music to boogie to. We like Disney movies and sofas pulled close to the TV and a plate drainer sitting on the sink. We don’t like to hoard junk, we like to recycle, we detest stuffy rooms and we don’t tolerate neighbourly pop-ins very well. We like water with ice in it and only one type of meat at dinnertime and icy poles in winter.

  That is our family.

  When someone comes into that highly personal, tightly configured sanctuary and tampers with it—nay, deliberately attempts to upset the balance to suit their own desires ... well, one begins to get narky.

  I have a tamperer, and I’m getting very narky.

  And the worst of it is that the tampering is so unnecessary. Ayi is only in our house a few hours a day, in a lovely, temperate, safe apartment. Why she feels the need to cause unrest and strain is really beyond me. It’s really screwing with me and pushing me to the outer limits of forbearance.

  Tolerance. I know. I’m deepening my capacity for it every day and if there’s anywhere in the world to learn it, it’s Beijing.