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Life in China Britons in China 2006
Life in China Britons in China 2006 | Britons in China 2006 |
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The trouble with living in Beijing is that the high-rise apartment blocks all look
the same. Well, similar enough to confuse two Englishmen with aversions to
orienteering and only ‘yi dian’ Mandarin.
We found ourselves putting pen to paper in one in Si Hui, in the east of the city on the third ring-road. The signing of the tenancy was watched intently by the landlady, her father, her son and her two daughters. As they stared over my shoulders, I felt like I was concluding a multi-million-yuan deal to build a new Olympic stadium. Nervous from handing over three months rent in advance plus a deposit , we returned to our hostel tucked away in a market hutong. It had been our claustrophobic home for one week but the backpacker clichés and the five inches between each other’s feet had worn us down. So we found ourselves back in the taxi to move into our new ‘Pimp Pad’ in yet another area recently snaffled up by property developers - Si Hui, in the east of the city, on the third ring road. Our flat had acquired this dubious title thanks to its red and white décor – a kind of Beijing art deco with a dollop of kitsch. Our key rattled our lock but the door of room 2704 would not open. The unfamiliar environment prompted wild imaginations. Was it all a scam? Had the landlady changed the locks and run off with our yuan? After all, we had found the flat by contacting a woman who called herself Anthony on a Beijing website. The door opened and a young lady was greeted by the sight of two ‘laowai’, with enough possessions to fill two industrial furnaces that hide the blue sky in this city, ready to move into her house. Broken apologies were mixed with hysterics. We found our home in the block opposite (room 2704) and reflected on another ludicrous thing we had done since leaving London a week before. Tom and I, friends since our sixth form college days in 1996, packed in our journalism jobs in the New Year. I had spent two years writing about horses running around fields for an antiquated text service on Channel 4 and Tom had been terrorising Islington’s councillors for three years on the Islington Gazette. China was dominating the headlines, the Olympics were now only two and a half years away and buildings were springing up in Beijing faster than in a child’s Lego box. So it made sense to find sub-editing jobs in the capital, try to master the lingo’s five tones and see what all the fuss is about. There are now tens of thousands of westerners living in pockets of Beijing. But at first, you wouldn’t know it. On arrival it feels as intimidating as playing paintball without a gun. Our foreign eyes pick up on cultural quirks: China’s state television channels, screened for controversy, are called CCTV; lifts in apartment blocks replace the unlucky Chinese numbers of floors 4, 13 and 14 with 3A, 12A and 12B; people barge their way onto the subway as if in the shadow of King Kong but rarely walk up escalators. Gradually things begin to make sense but you realise some things will never be explained. Over the next few months, we hope to create some kind of impression of what it’s like to live in Beijing as a westerner as the city continues its chaotic modernisation at breakneck speed. |
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