Uff, so this is my 4th attempt this week of writing a post – it’s gonna be long, but I’m gonna make it!! The city is really polluted today even though the insane raining yesterday should have cleaned it a bit. It’s eyesburning-coughing-can’t-see-the-nearest-buildings bad.
This (extended) weekend is Dragon Boat Festival, one of many Chinese holidays. We talked a lot about going somewhere new and exciting; Tsingtao, the small villages around Beijing, Shanghai… But as we didn’t plan it beforehand and some friends suddenly were unreachable, it didn’t happen.
What DID happen though, was that I was invited home to one of my students. I didn’t know whether to go at first, if it was inappropiate, among other reasons because we earlier rejected an invitation from another student because we had other plans. But I decided to go. I knew he was living with his mother in Beijing, so I figured I could go the on a quick visit. When I met him at the bus stop though, he told me the trip was 2-3 hours. Auch, should definitely have brought a gift.
But the bus ride was nice, it’s always a good opportunity to have a look at the city. I mean, there’s a lot of city to look at. The building started to get lower and lower until they were only a couple of floors tall and then we arrived. Dao le. The first thought that hit me was “whoa, this is real China”. We’ve been travelling around in China in the beginning of our stay and this looked a lot like the rest of China. Central Beijing is of course still Chinese in that big-anonymous-concrete-building way or big-and-super-flashy-but-shitty-quality. Did I say a bad word? Sorry. But I you imagined that everything was made of wood and colours instead of plastic and grey, this would actually look like the cultural China as you would imagine it with small shops and maze like structure. The atmosphere was relaxed, people sitting on the street playing majong, washing their hair, smoking, doing nothing. Nobody were rushing. Of course everything was falling apart, there was garbage around, possibly a bit smelly, but that is only avoid if you go to the super rich and/or expat areas in Beijing and even there it would be so in the sideways.
He was living in a sort of hutong’ish house. He had warned me that his home was small, and I’ve assured him that it doesn’t matter with the house, but with the people. But it was small. You would enter a kind of outdoor narrow hallway that led past a number of tiny rooms, all occupied by a family. In my student’s mother’s room there was a bed. The room was maybe 5 sqm, but it felt like home. Especially because of the hallway that made it feel safe and hutong’y (a hutong is an oldschool Chinese style of building a home). His “aunt” and “brothers” (they call close friends of the family and cousins aunts/brothers/and so on) were living in one of the other rooms. My student was so happy to be home and that I visited him and his whole family came and asked me questions through my student. Thank god for his dictionary. They asked me a lot about food in Denmark (if we had this and that, e.g. the cooked peanuts & peas we were snacking) and were very fascinated that my pants were 20 years old. In China things last a couple of months that’s the price of the cheap goods. And his mother told me I have fat calves. Then they all wanted to have a picture with me and we had an amazing lunch. And of course zongzi since it’s Dragon Boat Festival. Small packets of glutinous rice wrapped in leaves. Yum. And watermelon. Because. Always watermelon. I was almost bursting with food and they kept asking me to eat more. I said I had to be going home, but they all suggested that I should stay the night over. ‘Cause everybody knew I didn’t have to work the next day, it’s the holidays! But I (hopefully) politely declined, and went home filled with impressions.
All of the people in that area are migrants and work at clothing factories. They have maybe one day off every month and get paid (as you might have guessed) close to nothing. A normal monthly salary can be around 2.000 RMB or 10 RMB pr. hour and if you take to account that you have to support your family, that education and hospitals cost a fortune and that prices in Beijing are ridiculously high considered people’s salaries, it’s nothing. For example, Mikkel’s and my room are 2.100 RMB/month. We live in a bit expensive area, but it gives an idea.
My student is probably one of the kindest people I’ve ever met, and I’ve never seen that much wisdom and determination in a 19 year-old. Some of the things he said, especially with his enthusiasm, in the context and the language barrier, was some of the most inspiring things I’ve heard. How he’s studying that hard to get a good job, to be rich in order to help all the poor people in his community and bring his family back together. How a lot of Chinese really hate Japanese (they really do, WWII, the Nanking massacre), but he thinks it happened a long time ago and that you should be friendly to all people. And if was a good game on his computer? “No, I don’t like it. I think life is a good game.”
To change the setting completely, we visited IKEA yesterday. Mikkel has a Chinese friend who is going to study in Denmark this summer, so we are helping her a bit with the practical things. We were mainly going to IKEA to see if she should buy stuff here in China and bring it. Well, I went for the meatballs. I felt like a little child, jumping around on the backseat yelling “ARE WE THERE YET??” and ten minutes after we arrived. So surreal. You know all IKEA’s look EXACTLY the same inside, which confused my inner compass a whole lot. Like “Why am I in Sweden?” and “Why are there so many asians in IKEA today?”. Turns out that prices are exactly the same, so we spent most of the time eating meatballs with mashed potatoes and brown gravy and drinking REAL coffee!! And I really had to restrain myself from buying a whole lot of marinated herrings, snaps, meatballs, knækbrød, jam and cookies. Well, we bought a little snaps and cookies… Am gonna eat these things till I drop when I get home.
Afterwards we got back to our friend’s home where we drank some Swedish pear cider and ate Chinese “cookies” and grapes. And got a whole big box of zongzi. I love her mom. And my student’s mom. I think I just love moms. I miss my mommyyyy! Ahem. And then we walked through the deluge/storm/mayhem back home.
DUANWU JIE KUAILE!!
Aggy in China 