A Season in Red: My Great Leap Forward into the New China

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A Season in Red

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A Season in Red My great leap forward into the new China KIRSTY NEEDHAM

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Author’s note Some names have been changed and character details altered to protect privacy. Minor shifts in chronology have also been made to assist narrative flow.

First published in 2006 Copyright © Kirsty Needham 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Needham, Kirsty. A season in red: my great leap forward in the new China. ISBN 978 1 74114 755 1. ISBN 1 74114 755 7. 1. Needham, Kirsty, 1971– . 2. Travelers—China— Biography. 3. China—Description and travel. I. Title. 915.1 Internal design by Lisa White Set in 10.5/15 pt Sabon by Bookhouse, Sydney Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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For Peter Svehla

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Contents Contents

Prologue: Laowai, 2004

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

ix

Red Fever

1

Yellow Dust

12

China Daily

35

Certified Expert Foreigners

59

Dragon Gorge

70

SARS and Propaganda

86

A Captive Audience

102

Sky

128

The Campaign Against Youth Spiritual Pollution

153

Street Scenes

180

When Red Means Go

194

Hot in the City

208

Gaining a Name, Losing Face

224

Checking Out

247 271

Acknowledgments vii

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Prologue Laowai, 2004 Laowai, 2004

Sanlitun Lu, Beijing. Partying people spilled out of the bars in that other Party’s republic, and into the dark dirty alleys. It was more like a maze than a thoroughfare. I took midnight bearings from the giant beer mug that glowed on the corner of Workers’ Stadium Road and headed south to where the shadows hid a gauntlet of blue jackets. ‘DVD?’ demanded a crimson-cheeked entrepreneur with a bulging sack at her feet. ‘Yangrou chuan?’ implored the next wizened face, his scraps of spicy, fatty mutton roasting on coals. I slipped into the black, around rubble-strewn corners, as old neighbours disappeared into old brick apartment blocks. Metal rockers in vintage sidecar motorcycles rumbled by. Ahead was the roar of a dusty, loud mixing pot. Neon shacks that overflowed as young Chinese and foreigners converged on the street to unwind. The crowd gasped for air on hot summer nights like this, and sucked up warm Yanjing beer as a substitute. ‘Ganbei!’ cried a friend with a bottle in his hand. ‘DVD?’ called the shadows. I was ix

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mesmerised by Sanlitun’s light and dark. The street was sordid, haphazard and uncomfortable, everything the gleaming but soulless towers overrunning Beijing were not. And like every other dirty, unplanned, well-loved nook in the city, it was doomed. By 2.30 a.m. I was in Poachers, where tabletop dancing and swinging off the stair rails were obligatory at this kind of hour. A hundred arms thrust into the air with the techno beat, sweaty bodies twitched as though an electric current, not music, was coursing through their veins. But the tall Chinese boy standing next to me wasn’t dancing. He had a beer in his hand and he had a question. ‘Are you a spy?’ he asked. Two goateed Chinese musicians played air guitar. I watched as students, local and foreign, hailed the DJ. This was cool Beijing, cosmopolitan Beijing. And still that question. I felt disbelief. ‘Why does everyone in China think foreign journalists are spies?!’ The boy laughed, but he didn’t answer. Which was a pity, because by this point I really wanted to know. When the lights came on, we headed into the night for stomach-soothing bowls of noodles, doujiang and hundred-year-old eggs. ‘You’ve got a car?’ someone asked incredulously as we piled into my accuser’s white sedan. ‘This is nothing. When I studied in London, I drove a BMW,’ he bragged. The noodle shop was packed with weary groups of friends washing in at 3.30 a.m. When I stepped out the door half an hour later I was shocked to see the pre-dawn light.

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Laowai, 2004

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I made it home as the sun rose, a glowing orange ball greeted by a jack-hammer chorus. Across the city workers climbed scaffolding like soldiering ants, clocking on to the next shift—no time to rest—to build the new China. A night on the town under the red flag. By day I worked at polishing Chinese national pride. But this journey starts in a different city. Because like so many new Beijing stories, there is no beginning without a wrecking ball.

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1. Red Fever Red Fever

The red marble foyer of the Palace Hotel was a haven in a city under siege from construction sites that devoured ancient stone neighbourhoods whole and spat out grey dust. Concrete pipes and strewn red, blue and white striped plastic had made an obstacle course of downtown Beijing. Smog obscured the skyline. But from my hermetically sealed room high in the Palace, I could watch the HBO Movie Channel via satellite or peer down into the one remaining peak-roofed courtyard in the block. It was a window onto another world. Elderly inhabitants ambled in and out of their own crumbling four-walled sanctuary, pushing bicycles, pausing to chat or play chess on small stools, unperturbed as the cranes and wrecking balls menaced ‘progress’ overhead. The old men wore blue caps pulled down over their heads and the same faded blue jackets. I wondered who they were. It was 1997 and Beijing was ‘under reconstruction’ as the country straddled a Mao-suited past and the newer 1

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pursuit of ‘growing rich gloriously’. Bicycles surged along roads marked incomprehensibly in Chinese characters. Bored white-coated saleswomen at the Beijing Department Store guarded the contents of dusty glass cabinets against potential customers, especially foreign ones. At night hawker carts lit up the nearby snack street with the exotic glow of drum fires under woks and the rising steam of dumpling baskets. Inside the Forbidden City, country women in cotton padded jackets stared at my pointy nose and brown hair that frizzed in the damp autumn air. I took tourist snapshots of imposing red halls and dragon steps. They took photos of me. I was twenty-five and had been dropped here from outer space, unequipped to step beyond the hotel foyer without the reassurance of a guide or at least a hotel card for taxi drivers to read and return the mute, deaf, language-less laowai—outsider—to sender. I can trace this as the starting point of China fever. My being there was quite accidental. I had been sent to report on an international trade fair in Beijing, as multinational companies fell over themselves in the race through the door to the elusive Middle Kingdom. There were military brass bands performing under red banners, and evening banquets with government officials in the Great Hall of the People. But despite appearances, there were no foreign journalists—only ‘tour groups’. Whitefaced phone-company executives passed through a concrete-bunker air terminal smuggling concept technology in their personal luggage. The import licences needed to display products at the fair had been officially turned down by one arm of the sprawling communist bureaucracy, as

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another arm had welcomed the foreign investment and issued the invitation to come. The only answer the exasperated organisers could find was, ‘This is China.’ On the way out of the country everyone, fake tourists and executive smugglers, tried their best to ignore the box placed strategically on the customs hall counter and marked ‘accusations here’. China’s contradictions got under my skin. A nation that was personally warm yet officially forbidding. Eager to move forward, yet suspicious of the world outside its gates. And whose 1.3 billion people were embarking on one of the biggest societal transformations in history. Again. Where would it end? Back in Sydney, I enrolled in language classes and read Wild Swans. But it wasn’t enough. How is it that the things you know the least about—that on a purely rational assessment you should have the least connection to—can take root in the imagination, and before long grow into minor obsession? China was my grandmother’s embroidered silk shirts and porcelain, the mysterious orient, an old Peking that fell to Europe’s gunboat diplomacy in a time of immoral opium wars. China was the land of little red books and a long march by women with identical long plaits, all hidden behind a firmly shut door. China was sipping pots of green tea in a kitchen in Trades Hall on Sydney’s Goulburn Street with my laoshi—teacher—after language class, or queuing to see Gong Li films drenched with sumptuous red colour and aching music at Asian cinema festivals. But I really didn’t know what China was, or had been; I could only imagine what it was becoming.

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What did I know about communism? I confess only to two red buttons pinned defiantly to my school bag—Lenin and Marx. We’d met in an outer-suburban public library, where neglected shelves stacked with unfashionable paperbacks had revealed an outdated, 1970s bent in the politics aisle. Charismatic Russian figures in cold landscapes plotted in a convoluted language of dialectic theory and struggle that I barely understood. To me, Commie memorabilia was just a pop-culture commodity—another slogan on a T-shirt, badges to buy that shouted out ‘teen rebellion’. In 2002, armed with Chinese conversation and a backpack this time, I spent three months travelling a slow, haphazard road across the mainland with my boyfriend. I slept on straw beds in farmhouses, Ming villages rejuvenated by UNESCO funding, a rust-bucket boat plying the Three Gorges tourist trade before a dam deadline. I could see that China was changing fast. The West was lapping up heart-breaking tales of lives blown apart by the Cultural Revolution, as ‘overseas Chinese’, many of whose families had fled to America, Britain and Hong Kong after the Communist victory in 1949, committed to paper incredible personal stories from the past. But it seemed to me that for the most part those who stayed behind on the mainland were working hard to forget the bad times and were instead looking forward. Life now was as good as it had been in many people’s living memory. Later, as I sifted through photographs and tried to sort a traveller’s snap impressions into neat plastic album sleeves, I remembered three people, three different faces of China. •

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Mr Wang had taken us in from a cold and black night thousands of metres above the Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan province, where white water surged through sheer cliffs. High above the golden clumps of giant bamboo that somehow clung to its sides, past the goat herders and the dreaded twenty-four bends in the rocky path, the light from a farmhouse window shone into a darkness that had fallen quickly, catching us out hours away from the guesthouses at the end of the track. Mr Wang appeared at the door and beckoned for us to come in and sit at his kitchen fire. Strings of maize hung drying in the internal courtyard of the home; piles of pumpkins were stacked against the walls. A belled donkey, chickens and bounding puppy wandered the steep terrace outside. We weren’t the only travellers to stop in that night and were soon joined by three young Israeli backpackers and a group of Beijingers in high spirits. Mr Wang fed us hot plates of vegetable noodles and showed us to sleeping quarters in a large attic room that had been converted for just this purpose. He had established a better living for his family by providing shelter and charm to passing travellers. Overnight it snowed, and I woke to see gorge cliffs smattered with icing sugar. But the morning brought rain and swelling waterfalls that blocked the onward path. We were holed up, so passed the time chatting to Mr Wang about his life. It was physically hard. The mountain trail I had struggled up the previous day was the family’s only access route. A donkey carried supplies in tins, cans and bottles twice a week, but it was Wang’s wife who portered the fresh vegetables and fruit on her back, careful not to

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bruise them. The nearest school, although their son was too young to go yet, was just as far. There was no TV or telephone. Rural poverty was a world away from the comfortable living in China’s major cities. Still, the family were content. And the entrepreneurial Mr Wang was making his own opportunities. By early afternoon the weather had cleared. We left the farmhouse, where a battered Chinese flag flapped proudly in the wind. The path down involved detouring around obstinate donkeys laden with building materials as farmers from the nearby villages carried out running repairs to simple aqueducts that carried water between houses. But it was the construction workers running straight towards me in hard hats that was alarming. ‘Pengyou! Kuai le!— Friend! Hurry!’ they screamed, before huddling into the side of the cliff in the defensive crash position. I followed their example without knowing why. The mountain soon shook with a loud boom. It was a dynamite blast. Everyone kept low and waited, hoping the deafening rumble didn’t trigger a rock slide. My first thought was that they were building a road, but it turned out to be a much grander engineering feat. They were preparing to dam the gorge. It would spell an end to Mr Wang’s simple paradise. So China’s progress had casualties. • Shi Jian was a quietly spoken 25-year-old accountant from Shanghai with a penchant for Kylie Minogue songs and rubber wrist bracelets. He was my room-mate on a voyage down the Yangtze River in an old boat that bore no resemblance to the luxury tourist liner advertised in the

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brochure. Villagers were stowed in fourth class, camping with doonas on the filthy floor next to the cargo hold and choking on diesel fumes. We were travelling second class, sharing a dormitory with a chain-smoking old river trader dressed in a Mao suit, with a little red book stuck in his top pocket and a load of umbrellas under his bed. In the unrefrigerated ship’s kitchen, deep in the bowels of the boat, pig carcasses were haphazardly thrown on the floor and hacked to pieces. ‘Don’t even think about eating there,’ warned Shi Jian, who insisted on taking control of our menu himself. At each river landing he would skilfully procure local delicacies from the hawkers who lined the shore. Steamed baozi to eat for breakfast with salty eggs, hot bowls of stirfried chilli potatoes for lunch, and delicious poached wild catfish. Preparing food in China is an art, and so is knowing how to eat it. As the boat chugged through swirling brown water and entered the first of the Three Gorges, we stood aft—behind the toilets, because there was no viewing deck—and Shi Jian translated the captain’s continuous commentary on curious rock shapes. By the time we entered the second gorge it was nightfall, and the cliffs loomed as huge shadows through the cabin windows. The fourth day of our voyage was cancelled without explanation and passengers unloaded early at a different destination. The four-day boat trip was Shi Jian’s annual holiday. He had first needed to get a permit from his local police station to vacation outside Shanghai. His girlfriend wasn’t able to make it, so he travelled alone. Unaccustomed

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to tourism, he hadn’t brought a camera with him, or even a change of clothes. He was nonplussed about the holiday hiccups. It was a tour to remember and tell his work-mates about back at the office. We posed for a large group photograph at a ghost temple, and Shi Jian said he’d pin the polaroid on his apartment wall. We met again in Shanghai, where the price of beer in establishments fashionable among foreign expats was so high that Shi Jian could only afford one round. At a bar a few metres from the original meeting place of the Chinese Communist Party, he reflected that having a lifestyle was becoming more and more expensive. He doubted he could earn enough money to please his girlfriend, one of a new generation of young urban women whose expectations were skyrocketing. He didn’t like his chances of ever getting married, despite his rented apartment and job in the flashy Pudong district which towered over old Shanghai like some science fiction promise of a brighter future. • In Lhasa, a harsh but dreamlike place nestled in a cradle of snowy mountains on the roof of the earth, a child stepped out from the pilgrim crowd that moved slowly and constantly in a circle around the Jokhang Temple that sits at the Tibetan capital’s heart. She wore her thick black hair long and wildly unplaited, but bejewelled with red yarn and turquoise beads. She took my hand and addressed me directly in a clear voice. Holding my eye she began reciting in English the Tibetan history of her once independent land and the importance of the Buddhist temple, as the story had been passed down

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through her family. It was the version she was not taught at school, where the Chinese view of the world was compulsory. I asked her if she had learnt English in the classroom. She replied that she had not. Her grandfather, hovering protectively behind her, had taught her the language, and the history. He was a former monk, and like many had been forced out of the monasteries in 1959 following the Chinese occupation. They were now attempting a populate-or-perish form of cultural resistance, having as many children as they possibly could. The mainland government had resettled huge numbers of Han Chinese in Lhasa. Tibetans were fighting back by producing large families of up to eight or so children to keep their culture alive. Children that could make it to India left to train as monks with the Dalai Lama, whose image was forbidden here. Some were starting to come back. The thick smell of rancid yak butter wafted with incense through the air. The young girl and her grandfather disappeared back into the Barkhor circuit throng. Towering, broad-shouldered Tibetan men and women in leather boots, sheepskin wrap coats and broad-rimmed felt cowboy hats who had made the journey in from the harsh farming lands; crimson-robed monks and nuns with shaved heads; women in striped woollen aprons spinning silver prayer wheels and strings of beads in their hands. Walking together, around and around. The old man and his granddaughter had avoided unwanted attention from the Chinese police, and had passed on their message. Visiting the Potala Palace I was informed by my guide, who was from a family of eight himself, that the room of

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3000 gold and silver buddhas held the key to China’s claim on his country. ‘Travel outside Lhasa and you will see the purple, silver and blue hues of the mineral-rich cliffs. China wants our gold,’ he whispered. Tibet remained a land inseparable from its religion. Prayer flags littered the country, wrapped around trees and across mountains, and hung in a riot of colour on tall poles hoisted above houses. Public buses would not cross the few bridges that braved the plateau’s rivers without commuters first winding down windows to throw out paper votives. It was also visibly a land under occupation. Chinese troops practised manoeuvres with guns along the riverbend. The green uniforms stood out starkly in the moonscape. As the new China extended a welcoming smile to the world, it still had an older, hidden face. • I returned home to Australia but red fever stirred in my mind. I needed to know more. I needed to know what happened next. As the language lessons continued it seemed that Beijing, the capital city of rolling rrr’s that dripped off the tongue in the perfect Beijinghua accent, would hold the answers. In 2004 I got my chance. On the same day that the rice-paper acceptance notice arrived in my mail box from Beijing Language and Culture University, telling me when to start classes in the capital, I received a phone call out of the blue. A year earlier I had applied for an exchange program that would place an Australian journalist inside the Chinese media for three

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months. The program had been derailed by the outbreak of SARS and I’d forgotten all about it. It was now back on. ‘Congratulations,’ said an unfamiliar voice down the line. ‘You are going to work in China.’ Study or work? It was an easy choice. The thought of becoming a Chinese journalist was thrilling. Especially at the China Daily, an official government-run newspaper. It was the paper that was watched by the China-watchers.

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2. Yellow Dust Yellow Dust

The passengers swayed with a loose grip on the handrail, perspiration beading on foreheads and glistening on noses as the train pulled from one station to the next. Overhead fans pumped hard against thick air. I looked around the carriage at dishevelled businessmen dozing with heads rolled forward and wilting office girls standing shoulder to shoulder in the peak-hour rush. Everything seemed yellow. Soaked collars, rolled newspapers, clutched handbags, stocking socks in high-heeled sandals. I dismissed the thought guiltily. It must have been the dim fluorescent glow. ‘Jianguomen jiu dao le.’ Next stop, Jianguomen. I squeezed my way in the direction of the door and stepped out onto a platform the size of an aircraft carrier. Communists built the best public transport systems, I thought. Well, compared to the broken chaos of Sydney’s City Rail, they did. The station walls were dominated by patriotic mosaics in the social realism style, urging commuters onwards and 12

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upwards to the daily struggle. I emerged into daylight on Jianguomen Street, a torrent of cars rushing between highrises, and saw that the rest of Beijing, too, had an ochre tinge. My idyllic memory of the city was of crisp, clear air and skies the blue and white of a Qing vase. Not yellow. It was a stark seasonal difference. March winds had blown the Mongolian desert across the Chinese mainland. The yellow dust storms whipped up out of nowhere and mercilessly pelted the city with tiny balls of grit. A week ago I had been sitting at the Sydney Morning Herald’s foreign desk, selecting photographs for the world news pages, and had been struck by an image of a Beijing woman huddled in an overcoat, her long black hair blown horizontal. She had been caught in the street in a dust storm and with the grimace on her face you could taste the grit. ‘That’s where I’m going,’ I had said, and had made a note to pack the kind of wide, sheer silk scarf the women in the background were using to wrap their faces against the onslaught. Between taking off in Sydney and landing in Beijing, however, spring had arrived. The dust storms had abated and the temperature soared. But with no rain in the droughtstricken city to wash it away, the Mongolian desert remained as a layer of yellow dust. I needed to be on the other side of the Jianguomen intersection, a tangled Chinese knot of twenty lanes of traffic. It was only a few metres away, but compared to the smooth subway ride from my hotel, getting there was

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a pain in the arse. Pedestrians were dwarfed in the new Beijing by gleaming towers and immense ring roads that circled the city. Even bicycles had been usurped in the traffic pecking order by the clog of BMWs, VWs, 4WDs and competing red and yellow taxis. I was meeting a friend from Sydney. Allison had started work at a multinational with an office in Beijing. It seemed like a good idea to swing by and gather advice from any Old China Hands there on what to expect when I reported to work myself the next week, at China Daily. ‘Don’t expect to change the world,’ offered an Englishman with snowy hair and a knowing look. I laughed, but didn’t really know. Allison and I headed off to the nearest pub, because that was the Sydney habit. But this time it involved a small hike through sentry-lined streets where barbed wire and flowering creepers entwined to wrap the white-walled villas on the fringe of the embassy district. Rows and rows of potted plants—roses, hibiscus, pansies—crowded the footpaths under gingko trees, as if the bright flashes of colour would distract attention from the bright green of the People’s Liberation Army uniforms that also flourished in these parts. They marched briskly in squads of six, up and down the streets. It almost worked, unless you lingered too long to smell the roses. The John Bull was a full replica of an English corner pub, complete with dark wood panelling, framed cricketing legends on the walls and Guinness at extortionate prices. We settled at a window table, behind crimson curtains tied back with sashes, and I watched bicycle rickshaws work the street outside as we talked above the Friday-night expat din.

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Allison was twenty-six and, like me, had a bad case of China fever that had sucked her into Beijing’s whirlpool before she had finished her Mandarin degree at university. China was moving fast and you had to be here now, not in two years’ time. I told her I was relieved to be here. A fortnight earlier I had stood in the visa queue at the Chinese Consulate in Sydney, heart racing and hoping that this time around my paperwork would be approved. The bunker-like building was tucked into a small street behind Sydney University. Although I had arrived early— an old Chinese man with a creased face was the sole Falun Gong protester and still setting up his leaflets outside the entrance—the visa queue already snaked around the edges of the slate-tiled hall inside. At one end of the room a row of consulate officers sat behind a glass screen, each with a screw-top jam jar filled with hot green tea beside them on the counter. Most of the queuers were Australian-born Chinese, Chinese students or travel agents handling thick bundles of passports for tour groups. Unhappily, I had been here before. Every year, the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs in China issued invitations for cultural workers, translators, engineers and educators to come and work in Chinese Government companies and help build the nation’s glory. In each of these companies, a Foreign Affairs Office had responsibility for dealing with the foreigners and signing off on the paperwork that was essential to get them in the door. China Daily was allocated a dozen ‘Foreign Expert’ positions each year, and this year I was going to be one of them.

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Their Foreign Affairs Office had faxed me an impressive document with an official round seal at the bottom. I was to take the fax to the consulate in Sydney to gain a work visa, and on arrival in Beijing the form would be converted into a little red book embossed with gold stars—the Foreign Expert Certificate. The book recorded your address and employer and had pages to enter the amount of salary paid each month (essential if you wanted to later convert Chinese yuan back into a more portable foreign currency when you left the country). Like a passport, it was also carried as photo identification. When the Foreign Expert form arrived I excitedly rushed down to the Chinese Consulate. I noticed that under the Chinese characters for occupation, China Daily had listed me as a journalist. It could still be difficult for foreign journalists to travel to China and work openly, but I assumed this form with its round seal showed I was no longer an outsider; I was about to become a journalist for the People’s Republic. Ahead of me in the visa queue I saw people being periodically waved away by the counter staff. I didn’t think too much of it, except to note that arguing your case only seemed to worsen the officiousness of the response and got you nowhere. When my turn came I slid my visa documents across the counter to a woman with short clipped hair who looked to be in her thirties. After a quick glance at the form, she dismissed me. ‘Journalists cannot go to China.’ I persisted. ‘I am going to work for the Chinese media. This is a cultural exchange.’

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She looked at the forms again and, without saying a word, left the counter and disappeared behind a red feature wall. When she came back a few minutes later, she shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. I was shocked, but bit my tongue and left. That afternoon I rang the consulate’s media officer. She said that yes, she had received the fax I’d sent weeks ago to let her know that I had been granted a fellowship to work in the Chinese media for three months. My fax had rambled on about wanting to broaden my understanding of Chinese culture, and had explained that it was partly funded by the Australian Government. The fax had also asked for advice on visa requirements, but I hadn’t heard back. Over the phone, the media officer told me this was because the fax had been taken by ‘other officials’ within the consulate. These officials, who couldn’t be named, were ‘concerned’ about the motivation for placing a foreign journalist inside the Chinese media. ‘It is out of my hands,’ she said. ‘It would have been better if you had not mentioned the government.’ As a Chinese language student I had sat in class for years enthusiastically repeating that Zhong Guo, literally the Middle Kingdom, was the centre of the world. I had given three-minute speeches for assessment on the beauty of its mountains and rivers. Without the benefit of parents who spoke with a perfect accent, or a dialect with a common written language like my classmates from Hong Kong, I had to work hard to please my Beijing-born teachers. But

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they were patient and encouraging and shared the view of our textbooks that we were all ‘friends of China’. So how had I suddenly come under suspicion? The answer seemed to be that foreign journalists were never friends. While tens of millions of tourists flooded into China each year and were greeted with open arms as they spent billions, the Chinese Government continued to arrest journalist ‘spies’ on the broad charge of revealing state secrets to foreign media organisations. A ‘state secret’ could be the real death toll in a natural disaster, a forwarded email, or simply the news. The first crack had appeared in the warm, welcoming world of Peking duck dinners portrayed in my language textbooks. With only a few weeks to go until my flight left Sydney, there was no chance of gaining the approval from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Information Department in Beijing that the consulate said I needed. This was the equivalent of being asked to go right to the top. It was a process that could take months of negotiation and was usually only carried out by Western media companies wanting to place a new resident correspondent in China. I sent a panicked email to China Daily. They said they would speak to the consulate. A fortnight later I was given the verdict: I could go to China, but I would not be allowed to work as a journalist. The Chinese Consulate in Sydney was adamant that I should not write for any media outlet while I was there. My China Daily job description was changed to Foreign Expert English Language Polisher. I was relieved but a little disappointed. So much for my vision of vox-popping urban Beijingers on the city streets

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and penning lively stories about colourful local festivals involving firecrackers and lanterns. With nine days to go I took my passport down to the visa hall again and paid extra for express processing, just in case they changed their mind. Allison wasn’t surprised by my visa fiasco. Even for the Chinese, being officially licensed by the government to work as a journalist was a long and costly headache. But it was necessary to gain entry to any government press conference, or to interview officials wanting to control the news by tightly controlling the messengers. We arranged to meet up the following afternoon. I had arrived in Beijing a few days before I was due to start work to take a mini-break over Easter. Allison, who rode a bicycle to the office and more often ate fried dough sticks on the street for breakfast like her Chinese neighbours, offered to show me the sights of expat life in the city. • The next morning I took a walk from my cheap hotel, hidden in a sleepy hutong or alley behind the glitzy Wangfujing mall. The mall was a shopping mecca paved in red granite that ran parallel to the Forbidden City at Beijing’s centre. It was unrecognisable from my first visit. The night hawker carts had been reinvented as a sanitised, tourist-friendly Snack Street where gourmet delights were served up by charismatic spruikers in clean white coats. The grumpy ground floor of the Beijing Department Store had been transformed into a polished ladies palace of cosmetics, perfume and handbags. It took me longer to realise that the monolithic Sun Dong An Plaza, where escalators glided between airconditioned floors of fashion,

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Starbucks, Delifrance and KFC, had risen from the construction site I had seen from my hotel window all those years before. Along the mall, iconic tea and silk shops, hatters, shoemakers, bookstores and herbalists had all been made over, bringing wares they had traded for hundreds of years into the twenty-first century with a shiny brass plaque that testified ‘China Time Honoured Brand’. The camera shop bore a large photo of Mao in its window. I walked a few blocks further, towards the Forbidden City, to find large sections of the old stone neighbourhoods where hairdressers once set up chairs on the footpath to shave and shear the passing trade had also disappeared, replaced by a Disney-style recreation of history. I wondered what had become of one of the former inhabitants, an apprentice chef I had met on a hiking trip to the Great Wall. As a child living in a hutong just a stone’s throw away, Xiang Xiang had listened from his family’s shared, ramshackle siheyuan, or courtyard house, to the concerts performed inside the Forbidden City’s high red walls. He said the sound was as clear as the radio. A hotch-potch maze of hutongs had once wound among tens of thousands of these grey, humble homes where family life bustled under gently sweeping peaked roofs. From the alley, passersby and hawkers peddling coal for cooking, porcelain bowls and gold fish could just glimpse the comings and goings through each siheyuan’s red gate. Beijingers hauled their bicycles over ornate, ancient thresholds and disappeared behind a screen wall. Inside, four buildings faced onto a wide courtyard that had provided light, tranquility and

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privacy to one extended family in dynastic times. After 1949 the homes had been subdivided for the masses to share. Life was lived on top of one another, with old neighbours nattering away together on small stools in the open air, keeping watch as children played. The communal toilet, and telephone, were a brisk walk down the lane outside. One day in 2002 Xiang Xiang’s family discovered the character chai painted on the wall outside their home, marking it for destruction. Chai was tearing apart inner city Beijing, but could not be argued with because many families did not own the courtyard houses they lived in. Xiang Xiang worried that the compensation money offered to his family by property developers would force them to the outskirts of the city and into a much smaller apartment. Sure, the new apartment would have plumbing, but it was the end of a time-honoured Beijing lifestyle. Progress was compulsory and had seen entire neighbourhoods like his uprooted. The Catholic church at the northern end of Wangfujing was a popular skateboarding ramp for teenagers, when it wasn’t being used as a backdrop for Saturday brides choosing a fashionable white wedding. I watched a procession of women dressed as cream puffs pull up in limousines to pose for professional glamour shots in the square outside, though they never ventured through the church doors. ‘Western-style’ wedding was a costume change, not religion, in a city that prescribed scientific reason instead of the ‘opium of the people’. The church had been burnt and rebuilt three times since 1655 and was permanently closed during the Cultural Revolution. When I walked past,

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the doors were still locked. A notice said they opened briefly each morning at 6.30 a.m. Instead it was the chocolate counter of the swanky Swissotel that gave the first hint of Easter. Allison bought a small bag of eggs as we waited for her friends, Astrid and Gilles, to pull up in a taxi. The hotel was a random meeting point. We were heading out for a late lunch at the artists’ village where Gilles, a painter from France, was exhibiting. It was beyond the Fourth Ring Road, a Beijinger’s definition of far-flung. Gilles didn’t speak much Chinese and the disbelieving taxi driver was reluctant to follow his gestured directions as we passed beyond the luxury gated villas that had sprouted on the outskirts of the city in ambitious recreations of American, Spanish and German suburbia. I could see the taxi driver’s point: what business would young foreigners have out here, among the parched fields and peasants? It looked like a broad brown nothing. Gilles was insistent: ‘Turn left. I have been here before. I KNOW where I am going.’ The taxi finally pulled off the expressway and onto a road rattling with heavy blue trucks. On Gilles’s directions we turned again and bounced along a moon-crater dirt lane. Above us, electricity transmission towers loomed like an army of menacing robots. Through the side window, willow poles and grotty concrete shopfronts broke up the mess of scrap-metal junkyards. Small children played in the dust. The car came to a wooden gate in a brick wall and Gilles called out, ‘Dao le.’ We were there. The taxi driver left, shaking his head in puzzlement. But when Gilles pulled

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open the gate and we stepped through, it was like entering another world. A row of long brick warehouses was a hive of activity as sculptors, potters, painters, musicians and performance artists went about their thing. Gilles said it had started with a Chinese sculptor setting up a foundry in the countryside. Soon after, a European sculptor built a studio next door. Galleries began to lease studios to house artists. There were soon so many artists working in the commune that the foundry had to move out, and the warehouse it vacated became an exhibition space. There were big plans to expand with a hundred more studios in nearby fields. Gilles had decided to order off the plan and lease a space of his own in the next compound, due to open the following year. Demand was exploding as international word spread that the Chinese contemporary art scene was hot. Artists like Gilles were arriving of their own accord and were prepared to pay long-term rents to secure large spaces they couldn’t afford in Europe. Galleries were running international exchanges, and artists from across China had also congregated here, supplying dealers with a steady flow of work. Gilles introduced me to the Beijing sculptor who had founded the community. He said he had studied art in Perth. Some of Australia’s most innovative modern artists were Chinese immigrants from the post-Tiananmen wave of students that had fled the mainland in the late 1980s. But many overseas Chinese artists were now being drawn back to Beijing and the energy of a society in rapid flux.

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The first art commune set up in Beijing in 1997 had been shut down by the police. But this sprawling art community had been allowed to grow by authorities that turned a blind eye. ‘Maybe they think it is better that we are here doing this rather than doing other things, like making politics,’ suggested an older artist with a long memory. Gilles took us on a tour through rooms scattered with bronze castings and wax moulds and huge canvasses stacked against walls. He was enthusiastic about the atmosphere in the village, where international artists worked and exhibited alongside locals. Most people had converted their studios into combined living and work spaces. The lofts and galley kitchens looked onto a large central courtyard softened by grey river stones and lush green grapevines. Some studios had been elaborately transformed with indoor ponds for meditation and reflection, fancifully carved doors or traditional stone lions at the thresholds. Young Chinese artists were absorbed in their work and barely looked up as I wandered through. Sexually provocative, sensual images were emerging in bold brushstrokes. It seemed older artists were still wrestling with Mao and the propaganda images that had filled the visual landscape of their childhood. The great helmsman reappeared frequently at the end of a brush. Western onlookers might bitch about a tired theme that had been done to death already, but decades of icon building would take longer than that to shake up, digest and spit out. It wasn’t regurgitation, it was subtle manipulation. Sometimes so subtle as to elude the outsider.

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‘I think it is irony,’ said one artist, when I asked about a series of paintings depicting a grey Mao sleeping. ‘I remember when Mao Zedong died, you know. I was in middle school and the whole country went into mourning.’ Sometimes the manipulation was blatant, a message even an idiot consumer like me could understand. What is the difference between Coca-Cola and communism? Aren’t they both red, shiny and mass-produced? Other Chinese artists loved conceptual art and getting naked on the Great Wall, walking cabbages, licking things— ‘this is about flavour, and the Chinese culture’s obsession with food,’ it was explained. The police and the local farmers didn’t understand it at all, and more than one phone call had been made to the Central Academy of Fine Arts by authorities needing to check whether they had an artist or a lunatic on their hands. Others were trying to develop an artistic vision of what came next for China. This was the question that I really wanted an answer to. ‘We can’t just take on consumerism and travel down the same road as other countries and make the same mistakes they have made. We can’t just be swept up in globalisation. We need to take the valuable things from our past, of socialism, and find something new that is our own,’ said one curator. Many of the residents were graduates of the nearby Central Academy of Fine Arts. Some had day jobs as art lecturers at universities or high schools. Others were professional artists who made their living from the sale of work.

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‘There is more freedom here, and more culture,’ said one woman when I asked why she had moved to Beijing from China’s north. ‘Shanghai is too fast, too much about money.’ Life was simple, although sometimes bordering on impoverished. You worked, went to exhibition openings on the weekend where beer was drunk and spicy lamb skewers roasted over hot coals were savoured. When a gallery director was paying, there were group dinners at the ecotheme restaurant down the road: the tables were set amid an indoor rainforest of trees, running streams and caged birds. Otherwise, people played in bands. I was astonished to see a large St Bernard dog lazily sleeping in the midday sun. Gilles said it was owned by one of the Chinese artists. ‘The ultimate counterculture fashion accessory,’ he said. ‘Large dogs are banned inside the Fourth Ring Road, but you can have them out here—if you have the energy to keep up with them—because it is rural.’ Urban Beijingers lovingly walked identical white, pocketsized yapping fluff balls in parks, but a big European dog, now that stood out in the crowd. Over a delicious lunch served outside on a wooden table and stools, Gilles said an artist’s life in China was good. He had recently sold one of his paintings to a collector in Shanghai, prompting inquiries from galleries about his exhibition plans. The market for selling art here generally wasn’t strong for foreign artists, but the allure was the space and cheap materials that opened up new possibilities for artistic experimentation.

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Gilles was teaching a few hours a week at an art college, and Astrid was working as a language polisher. It put the rent on a renovated courtyard home in a quaint and fashionable downtown hutong within easy reach. As old hutong families were being moved out of dilapidated courtyards, Beijing’s new creative class, with decorators, were marching into the remaining poetic pockets. It was a real estate trend that seemed familiar. • The afternoon of art, food and conversation would have been enough to serve as a happy introduction to the city, but it turned out to be only the warm-up act. That evening I piled into another cab with five frocked-up women and our Santana sedan sped off into the night. Outside was a lightshow of highrise construction and real-estate billboards that pitched unoriginal names in English to Chinese yuppies yearning for anywhere else but here: Palm Springs, Park Avenue, American Valley, Central Park, Upper East Side, Chateau Regency II, Peace Town, Home of Tycoons. We were headed for ‘798’ factory in Dashanzi, a light industrial precinct that, surprise, surprise, was under imminent threat of being overrun by property developers. Until the bulldozers actually moved in, however, workers in blue overalls continued to clock on each day in a rabbit warren of Soviet-built electronics workshops. Under fading red slogans, the workers ground metal on curvy green German machinery installed in the 1950s. They did their best to ignore the crazy hippies that had set up shop around them two years earlier and kept poking cameras through the door. Art studios had been joined by fashion

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and graphic designers. Beijing’s in-crowd and the bars and cafes had followed. The work spaces were cavernous, the aesthetic Bauhaus and ‘true industrial’, and the former 798 factory had been quickly declared the next Soho. Prices soared, and the international galleries moved in. But a weary comrade in blue overalls, cloth shoes and a cap could still clock off early for the day with a voltmeter tucked under one arm and the weekly arts guide under the other. I saw him wander freely through the white-washed creative maze, checking out the neighbours. It was truly bringing art to the people. Tonight a group of professional expat women were hosting an event at 798 that had promised the elusive: big imported knickers. Marks & Spencer, Calvin Klein, Hickory . . . the brand names rolled off the tongue of Allison’s Scottish boss Judy like long-lost friends. These were names that promised a girl with curves stuck in a land of hipless beauties that, perhaps, something might fit. The average Western bum could not be squeezed into Chinese undies and the most popular variety of local bra was padded and barely useful. New arrivees quickly discovered that even singlets were a challenge, reduced to midriff tops by the time they’d stretched across bumps they had not been designed to tackle. After countless wrong turns that forced the taxi driver to stop and ask for directions, a gaggle of Western women spilled into a dark laneway. Local women sat on stools in their pyjamas outside crumbling grey homes and washed the evening dishes in tubs. They looked up at us quizzically. We

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had disturbed their peaceful routine. It didn’t look anything like an entertainment precinct, but the taxi was gone. We followed Judy blindly into the night, dodging oncoming truck headlights, in search of our out-of-the-way hot spot. We eventually stumbled around the corner, where a large two-storey building looked promising. As we got nearer I could hear laughter and music. We entered through the back of the factory, and headed down an industrial corridor. To the left was a moody little Mediterranean bar rapidly filling with foreign girls. More intriguing was the red carpet that swept its way under a huge spotlight to a door on the right. Chinese fashionistas wafting up the carpet on stiletto heels with men in black were followed by the flash of photographers. Pop music blared from the open door, and through the mist of dry ice I spied tables of champagne. Obviously some kind of launch. But for what? A giant cat-face logo identical to the defunct American music website Napster, with the words ‘So Cool’, dominated the entrance. ‘Shall we investigate?’ I asked Allison. She nodded. But we paused a fraction too long before turning a hard right through the door. Uniformed men emerged from nowhere to block our path and ordered us away. ‘A little overzealous for bouncers,’ I said, but not to their faces. Their uniforms looked like green military. Did the Chinese army have a natural bent as inscrutable door nazis? Whoever they were, they were highly efficient at keeping pesky reporters and the unwashed out of elite occasions. So Cool turned out to be a new shopping centre that had ripped

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off the Napster logo. Not even internet music pirates were safe from copyright infringement in China. We retreated to our foreigners’ undies party instead. Judy had already made a beeline to the racks of knickers in the corner of the bar, which had been exclusively booked for this event but with a far more relaxed door policy than its neighbours. A drift of bemused, middle-aged Chinese men in black wandered in from So Cool next door. Judy held a leopard print Calvin Klein g-string aloft with disappointment. She had been hoping for something of the more practical day-to-day variety. But to the pair of English publicity chicks that had organised the evening’s do, the flimsy lingerie on the rack represented something more important than comfort. These were man magnets. And in a city of famed local beauties the stakes were high and prospects poor for a foreign girl without this sort of ammunition. Spotting a new face, a short black suit with dazzling pearls marched up and thrust a card into my hand. She was doing PR for an American investment firm. The Beijing Professional Expat Women’s group was still finding its feet, but the new arrivals kept coming as international companies poured into the city, she told me. A girl dressed in a silk Chinese jacket introduced herself as Panda Li. She said it was a new name, chosen for the language classes she had started that week at the Beijing Language and Culture University. Last week Panda had been plain old Marnie, a brown-haired and blue-eyed English chick in her late twenties who lived in Hong Kong. She had come to Beijing on a student visa for a twelve-week

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crash course at BLCU. Panda’s new name was impressive— cuddly yet nationalistic. It had once been compulsory for foreigners studying in Beijing to be issued with a Chinese name. Foreign names were too weird, decadent and difficult to pronounce. As English became more widely spoken, English names were also becoming more acceptable. But it was still the habit for Chinese-language students to take a Chinese name. All of the foreign characters in our textbooks had one. ‘Perhaps I could be Civet Cat Chu?’ I said, and Panda rolled her eyes. It was a corny SARS joke referring to the unfortunate furry creatures blamed for sparking the virus, although it was hardly their fault the southern Chinese had an appetite for eating everything wild and exotic. In truth I was too daunted to choose a Chinese name of my own. There was no easy translation of Kirsty, nor an equivalent of Jane or Mary to pick off the shelf. Chinese names were laden with meaning and portent, and naming trends shifted with the times. One of my teachers had been a Xiao Hong, which was translated by people who didn’t know her as ‘Little Red’. This annoyed her. She said her name was ‘Morning Rainbow’. But Xiao Hong admitted the name had held certain protective qualities for the daughter of two intellectuals during the height of the Cultural Revolution. Many people born in that time were patriotic Little Reds, Forever Reds or Towards the Sun, while children of the 1980s reflected hopes for economic prosperity. I was still waiting for the right name to come along. Hong Kong department stores had been dealing with English bums for over a hundred years, courtesy of

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colonialism, so Panda hadn’t come for the knickers. She suggested Allison and I leave with her and move on to a university party instead. Her classmates were meeting across town at Cloud Nine in Sanlitun. Before leaving Sydney I had asked a Chinese-born lawyer I knew why she preferred visiting Beijing to Shanghai. She was young, but told me that Shanghai was at risk of being swamped by foreigners as it rapidly Westernised. In her view, Beijing was still a very Chinese city, and there was really only one street where the foreigners had taken over. That street was Sanlitun Lu. Technically, Sanlitun wasn’t one street but a euphemism for a stockade of embassies, restaurants, hairdressers, tailors and bars clustered in the city’s east. It was Beijing’s latest concession to foreigners. By day the leafy and tranquil northern section of Sanlitun hosted ladies-who-lunched and business meetings at elegant cafes, but by night boozing dominated its epicentre. This was my first encounter with the heady mix of street beggars, soccer louts and DVD touts. Cloud Nine was on the top floor of a building in a back alley that had installed door nazis to keep its hip clientele distinct from the rabble. This time, with Western faces, Allison and I got in. The opulent room boasted lounge booths screened for privacy with sheer silk curtains, and had the ambience of a 1920s opium den. Plonked on chairs, Panda and I talked about our expectations of Beijing life. ‘I want to be a Beijing worker,’ I said. I was about to enter life in a communist state-owned enterprise. A taste

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of socialist austerity might be a nice antidote to shop-aholic Sydney ways. ‘I think, deep down, that I was always meant to be Chinese. My family always ate dinner quite early, at 5 p.m., and my mother hassled us kids to study and do well at school,’ said Panda, only half joking. Her classmates were mostly young Korean, Japanese, American and British students. Thirty thousand foreign students were flooding into Beijing a year, a figure that continued to soar with China’s economy. Some, like Panda, were hopeful of job opportunities on the mainland if they could crack the fluency barrier. And it was a barrier in most fields. There were so many highly qualified bilingual Chinese with overseas experience (hai gui they were called, or sea turtles) that multinational offices barely needed to look at a foreigner these days. Others were American-born Chinese who had their heritage stamped on their face but couldn’t utter a word in their ancestral tongue. They were here trying to bridge a cultural gulf that was rapidly narrowing with every new McDonald’s that hung out the golden arch. I had accidentally bumped shoulders with a tall college boy on the stairs and automatically threw a quick duibuqi in apology. He was indignant, and called after me: ‘But hey, I’m an American like you!’ Panda and her friends had long weeks of rote learning ahead of them, of contorting their mouths and sing-songing their ears into submission to find the melodic difference between a horse and your mother—both ma’s. There was no quick way to memorise thousands of characters that on

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first inspection appeared a jumble of black lines. It was a long path I was still travelling. But gradually, with time, the internal order of a beautiful symbolic language, its pictographs, stroke sequences and connected meanings, would be revealed and become hard to forget. Every time I defeated a page of intricate boxy characters with my little red dictionary, I felt a deep satisfaction at having understood what was once incomprehensible. I could read a song, poem, or four-character chengyu idiom in a way I was unable yet to understand China itself. I was high on the excitement of a new city, but it was late and Allison was finally wilting. I jumped into a taxi and blurted out the directions to my hotel to the driver. He chuckled and put his foot to the floor, which was a relief because I hadn’t tested my Chinese at the end of a late night before. Allison called after me, ‘Good luck! And don’t forget you can always come and crash on my sofa if it gets too much.’ I couldn’t imagine I would need to. Based on my glossy expat weekend, I was sure the coming months were going to be exhilarating. I was finally living in Zhong Guo, fast becoming the centre of the world. I had no idea.

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3. China Daily China Daily

‘Where have you been?’ asked the young woman, looking up from her computer. She was alone in the office, a whitetiled room off a long tiled corridor on the third floor of the China Daily building. I was lucky to find it. The guard at the front gate of the compound had initially refused to let my taxi through—no outsiders allowed. I gestured pleadingly at the bags piled onto the back seat beside me and he relented and waved the vehicle on. It pulled up outside a squat office tower and I spilled out with my luggage and squeezed through a revolving glass door. It was 9.20 a.m., Monday, the morning I was due to start work. My only instructions had been brief and sent by email: turn up today, at this address, and come to the Foreign Affairs Office. There had been no reception desk or directory board in the lobby. I dragged my bags into the lift and took a punt. On the third floor a series of identical doors marked in Chinese characters and English opened off a corridor: Editorial Board Member (shut); 35

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Advertising Sales (shut); Director (shut), and finally, the Waishi Ban—Foreign Affairs Office. So here I was, dressed in a suit in need of an iron and with probably too much baggage, but keen and ready to start. I knocked lightly to attract the attention of the woman in jeans sitting with her back to the open doorway and called out, ‘Hi.’ ‘Where have you been?’ she shot back. There were no introductions. I smiled, a little puzzled. The email, sent weeks ago, had only given a day, not a time to report for duty, and gave no details of where I would be staying, or what to do with my luggage. Was I late? Apart from the woman, the office was empty. ‘I wasn’t sure what time you started here . . .’ I offered. ‘I’ve already been here an hour,’ she snapped. She stood up. Then to really confuse things, added, ‘You are so early! No one else has arrived yet.’ Long permed hair framed a pale, elegant face. I guessed she was in her early twenties and that this must be Ting Ting, the emailer. Her face stretched into a smile and she asked again, ‘Where have you been since arriving in Beijing?’ The penny dropped. It was now four days since I had landed in China. But how did she know that? When I’d hit the reply button I’d simply confirmed that I’d be here Monday. Asialink had asked the Australian Embassy in Beijing to meet me at the airport, but in transit I had received an email apology saying no one was available because of the Easter long weekend. That was fine—I could look after myself.

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‘I stayed in a hotel. I visited some friends,’ I told Ting Ting. ‘Australian or Chinese friends? Who are they?’ I was a little unnerved by the questions, which were beginning to feel like a mild interrogation. ‘Australian friends. Some students in Beijing to learn Chinese.’ It wasn’t exactly a lie, but my guard was automatically up. I didn’t understand what the problem was, and didn’t want to inadvertently drop someone in it. The answer was vague enough and she let the issue slide. ‘You should go to your apartment. You can wait there until other people arrive,’ Ting Ting instructed. She picked up my daypack and led the way down the corridor. I followed behind with the rest of my belongings. We caught the lift back to the ground floor and walked out through the car park and past printing presses to an apartment block at the other end of the walled compound. It was still only metres from the office. Construction rubble was piled in a heap in front of the concrete stairs that led up to the apartment block’s entry vestibule. Broken bricks, plumbing, plaster and a dislocated toilet were discarded next to a rubbish cart for domestic waste, spilling over with plastic bags. Hundreds of bicycles were parked neatly in racks to the right. The foyer was bare concrete, coated in a white powder drifting in on the shoes and shoulders of the labourers that trouped through from apartments being renovated on the floors above. The labourers were dressed like me, in suits

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that needed ironing. Except theirs were oversized, torn and muddied. The Western suit was, ironically, the standard dress code for Beijing’s migrant workers—peasants who had arrived in their millions from the countryside, looking for some of the loose change from China’s economic miracle. More than half of China’s population, some 800 million people were rural residents. When they turned up in the city they were unskilled, often exploited, and could work for months without pay. China Daily had its own small army of them living in a canvas tent and sleeping on stretchers. They stared at me. In the lift, a middle-aged woman in a blue uniform looked me over curiously before pressing the button. She sat on a rickety wooden chair and spent her days riding up and down in the claustrophobic box. Ting Ting showed me to my door. It was in the stairwell on the thirteenth floor behind two abandoned wardrobes. She opened it and we squeezed into an unlit, cramped space with a storage cupboard off to the side, and another door dead ahead. After struggling with the keys in the dark, this second door opened into my apartment. ‘Here you are,’ she said, waving her arm around the room, before volunteering the opinion, ‘This is too big for one person.’ I was given keys and told I could come back to the office at 11 a.m. Ting Ting disappeared. I dropped my bags and surveyed my new home. In contrast to the grimy concrete exterior of the block, the apartment had been recently gutted and replastered and

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had bright white walls, a tiled entry, and parquetry floors in the bedroom and living room. Big windows covered in yellowing artificial snow and a scrawled ‘Merry Christmas’ let in plenty of light, and there were panoramic views. Beyond the compound lay a sea of dark-brick apartment buildings and construction sites, and in the distance was a glimpse of the western hills. The dominant view from the lounge room was of the office. The tiny bathroom was lined with marble-effect tiles and offered a Western toilet, twin-tub washing machine and shower head over a drain. It was spotlessly clean and a toothbrush, plastic cup and handtowel had been placed on the vanity shelf. The shelf was held up with a piece of green twine strung from the wall mirror. The smell of rotting cabbage wafted up from the sink hole. I put in the plug. The kitchenette had a gas stove and a narrow window that opened above the street. In the cupboard I found a ceramic cup with a lid for drinking green tea, rice bowls, a meat cleaver and plastic bags. A green fridge stood in the otherwise bare entry hall. I opened the fridge door but quickly shut it again. It was turned off and stuffed with plastic bags full of spoiled food and drink. In the living room, four wooden desks were pushed against the wall. I opened a desk drawer and saw more plastic bags. The largest desk had a glass top with postcards and photographs stuck underneath. A Chinese woman with rosy cheeks posing next to a river somewhere beamed up from one of the happy snaps. It looked like someone’s lost office. I opened one of the plastic bags. Inside was the flotsam of a journalist’s working life: pens, jotter pads, a promotional

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drinking cup with company logo, an out-of-date desk calendar, assorted business cards and an unopened packet of sanitary pads. I looked around for something more useful for apartment living, something other than desks. There was a lime green sofa under a drop sheet to conceal the rips in its foam, a rust-dappled glass-top coffee table, and a brown veneer television set of the same era. In the bedroom, a cherry-coloured wardrobe and matching single bed looked smart enough. But when I sat down, I hit the bed with a hard thud. I lifted the cover and saw there was no mattress, and I couldn’t find a pillow. I tried the door to the third room. A clock radio and chest expander sat on a rattan chair that was unravelling in the corner and too precarious to sit on. Splintering wooden planks stacked in a pile looked like they might form another single-bed frame. A glass display cabinet was locked and full of newspaper-wrapped treasures. A decrepit wardrobe was filled with plastic bags. It looked like the room was being used for storage. It felt out of bounds. I shut the door again. When I found Ting Ting in the Foreign Affairs Office later that morning it was buzzing with staff. ‘The Foreign Affairs director has invited you to lunch at noon,’ she said brightly. ‘Great,’ I said, and asked about the missing mattress and pillow. ‘These are the landlord’s matter. The landlord is very busy.’ Ting Ting was annoyed again.

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A Chinese woman with high cheekbones and smiling eyes, wearing a traditional green shirt introduced herself as Susan. She said she lived with her son and husband in the same building as me. ‘I can bring the landlord to see you later in the day. You can ask about the mattress then,’ she said. Although an increasing number of people working for China Daily were applying for mortgages and buying their own apartments, most staff still had their accomodation provided by the company. Young singles lived dormitorystyle in a new apartment block next to my building, while families lived in the old apartments. China Daily subcontracted property management to a real estate company. I wasn’t on the payroll, however, so didn’t qualify for free housing. Ting Ting said I would have to cough up cash for three months rent in advance, today. After returning from the bank, I asked her whether it would be possible to arrange a receipt. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, looking at me strangely. She had never paid rent herself, so couldn’t see the point. I was amused at the cultural gap but insisted that I needed a receipt for an amount that was equivalent to one month’s salary for a Foreign Expert, and double that for Chinese staff. ‘I think we can come up with something on the computer,’ said Susan. My landlady was intrigued to stamp a sheet of A4 paper, typed up in Chinese characters and English, with her neat signature seal in red ink, while I scrawled my name in biro and handed over 7500 yuan—about 1200 dollars.

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The landlady’s name was Zhou Mi, and it was she who had organised my ‘fully-furnished apartment’ on the abandoned thirteenth floor, which until last year had housed all of China Daily’s Foreign Experts. When the foreigners were shifted across to the new building, their designated microwaves, armchairs, stereos, DVDs, inner-sprung double mattresses and dining tables went with them. I was now pretty much alone on thirteen, although the night attendant sporadically slept and read the paper in a tiny alcove opposite the lift with a hot flask of tea after midnight. The eclectic furnishings in my apartment had been gathered up from throughout the building by Zhou Mi as renovating Chinese families ditched their past in favour of a trip to Ikea. The thrifty landlord was something of a bower bird, and was using my apartment to store the things she couldn’t bear to see discarded. In her eyes, there was so much unnecessary waste in the emerging consumer society. At noon, all work in the China Daily compound stopped as the dining hall opened its doors for forty-five minutes precisely. I followed Ting Ting and Susan down the stairs to the second floor—‘We try not to use the lift’—and into a large communal washroom where workers hosed down hands and their BYO metal rice bowls and chopsticks. On the other side of the washroom was the dining hall, where long rows of tables could seat several hundred at a time. At the appointed hour, kitchen staff in white coats, hats and plastic gloves wheeled out trays of hot dishes to stalls positioned around its walls. You perused, queued and pointed. The fuwuyuan, or counter staff, rang up the price of each dish on the cash register. But you couldn’t pay cash.

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Everyone was issued with a magnetic card to swipe across the register, and the cost of each dish was deducted from the card’s stored value. ‘We will give you a card with two hundred yuan on it,’ said Susan. ‘After that is used up, you can only add to its value on Tuesdays between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. at the dining hall administration office.’ It was a generous gesture that would last for weeks with the heavily subsidised food prices. Because the dining hall was so cheap, many people ate breakfast, lunch and dinner there seven days a week. Susan took dinner home for her family in takeaway boxes. It partly explained the tiny apartment kitchens. We kept on walking as the tables quickly filled with rows of hungry staff shovelling down rice, and climbed another set of stairs. I was being afforded the honour of lunching with the Foreign Affairs team in the small restaurant above the dining hall. Although it used the same kitchen, there was a broader menu, table service and private rooms that could be booked to entertain guests. The Foreign Affairs director smiled as I sat down at the round table and held out his hand in greeting. He was addressed casually as Old Chen around the compound, but the ‘old’ was a relative term. The director was an energetic and fit man in his fifties who dressed snappily in chinos and an open-collared checked shirt, a pair of glasses resting atop high cheekbones on a long, angular face. His deputy, also Chen, in turn suffered the nickname Small Chen despite his towering stature and a respectable age of forty-something. The naming convention was common and a result of Chen,

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along with Wang and Li, being the most common family name in China. Old Chen poured tea from a pot into small white cups that sat at each place. ‘Where did you go?’ he asked me. It was the minor scandal of my missing four days again. His pleasant tone partly masked the seriousness of the question. I repeated the answer I had given Ting Ting that morning. Old Chen continued to smile as he told me the Chinese Consulate in Sydney had been very firm in its directive that he was to ensure I didn’t write for any Australian media while I was in China. ‘Of course,’ I said, nodding. Leaning across the lunch table, Small Chen asked to see my passport. Luckily it was in my handbag. I was still getting used to random requests for identification. I had been told by the Chinese Consulate that I would need to visit the Public Security Bureau, a branch of the police, when I arrived in Beijing to be interviewed and register my address. The process sounded daunting. Small Chen inspected my visa and said he would take care of it instead. ‘You will need to leave your passport with me for a few days. I can arrange to have a Foreign Expert Certificate issued,’ he said. We talked newspapers and compared circulation sizes. China Daily had an official circulation of 300 000. The Sydney Morning Herald’s was roughly the same. However, Old Chen told me that I would not be working at China

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Daily, and would instead start with a weekly business paper owned by the company. ‘Perhaps after that you would like to work at our student newspaper. This is more fun than China Daily,’ he said firmly. ‘Then, if you still want to, you may work at China Daily.’ The uncertainty of this last statement worried me. To work at China Daily was the main reason, after all, I had travelled so far. It was the paper watched by the Chinawatchers. And I was a journalist, not a student. ‘I am looking forward to China Daily,’ I said with what I hoped was obvious enthusiasm. Making my way back from lunch, I had to dodge an obstacle course of ping-pong tables. Ping-pong had appeared from nowhere to fill the corridors and main foyer of the building. Those that weren’t playing gathered to watch the frenetic matches and barrack loudly. It seemed the reason for the extra long, hour-and-a-half midday break was to allow time after digestion for this important national sport. I was given the rest of the afternoon off to unpack by my new boss at the business paper. Back at the apartment, I was soon joined by my landlady, who let herself in with her own set of keys. Zhou Mi handed me a gift of pink plastic sandals with yellow bunnies on them and blackened tread, sticky from extensive prior use. ‘To wear around the house when it’s hot,’ she said. ‘Piaoliang—they’re beautiful,’ I told her. Zhou Mi didn’t speak a word of English but was pleased with my attempts at Chinese, so decided to stay a while and sort the foreign girl out. I noticed that since I had left that

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morning, another desk and an old wardrobe had been wheeled into my apartment and left on a trolley next to the fridge. A round cushion with an embroidered pink cover and strong perfumed scent sat on my bed. It was filled with sand. A solidly built woman with a bob haircut, Zhou Mi wore the dark slacks and silk shirt that befitted a middleaged lady of responsible position. She pottered around emptying desk drawers and clearing the fridge of its bags and bags of rubbish while I tackled the bedroom. As I was making the bed, Zhou Mi wandered in to check on my progress. She quickly let me know that I had stuffed it up. With no sign of an inner-sprung mattress, and trying to make the best of the situation and the night ahead, I had hunted through the cupboards and found an assortment of doonas which I stacked in futon-style layers against the hard base of the bed. On top I had spread a faded peach sheet, and over it a cheerfully striped sheet I decided I liked the look of. Finally, a light nylon doona already in its slipcover was thrown over the top. I thought I’d done a rather good job. But Zhou Mi looked at my efforts in dismay. She ripped the first doona off the top and threw it onto a chair, and shook her head at the layers of hidden doona beneath. She began to strip them off too. ‘Bu ganjing! Not clean!’ she scolded. I picked the doonas up from the floor and put them back on the bed. Zhou Mi whipped them off again. I searched for my dictionary and the words to explain that there was no way I would be able to sleep on such a hard surface.

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On hearing this, Zhou Mi looked at me with some degree of pity and relented. The doona futon could stay. She took the book from me and after flicking through pointed out the characters to explain she would instruct me in the correct method for making a Chinese bed. First, the largest sheet obviously went on the bottom with the smaller sheet on top, no matter what colour they were. The doona had to be folded into quarters and placed at the foot of the bed, while a handtowel was laid over the head cushion to keep it clean. Another large sheet needed to be thrown over the whole thing as a cover every morning to keep off Beijing’s dust. ‘This is most important,’ she said. I watched penitently and assured her I would make my bed every day like a good Chinese girl. I wondered if she would come back and check. Enthused, Zhou Mi proceeded to show me how to turn on the hot-water system in the kitchen, and flung open the cupboards to laugh at some of the hao wanr, or interesting things, she had unwrapped from plastic bags under the sink. She held up seed pod gourds souvenired from distant provinces, strangely shaped but empty liquor bottles, a plastic promotional water jug. She generously insisted I keep them all. That night, after eating dinner at the dining hall and returning to my bare new home, I set out on an emergency shopping spree. I was a wanna-be Beijing worker in an austere socialist apartment, becoming a little green-eyed of my Chinese neighbours’ comfortably furnished and fashionable homes. Susan had mentioned there were

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department stores nearby, but I had no idea where. I had no idea where I was. The China Daily compound was deep in the heart of Beijing suburbia, between the Third and Fourth Ring Roads. I walked in the dark through streets of old-era red-brick apartment blocks, past school yards, rose gardens, and duck and noodle restaurants. It was a serene neighbourhood, so I was surprised to see that a number of streets, including the one running alongside China Daily, had tall metal gates that could be swung across the road and locked shut to prevent vehicle access. I wondered how often this happened, and who was being locked out. Or in. I found a small supermarket and ticked off the essential items on my list: towel bigger than a handtowel for drying Western-sized bum, and a soft, fat rectangular pillow. Both were being discounted as obviously few people had much use for such oddities. I also bought an iron, to distinguish myself and my travel-worn suit from that of a migrant worker, although technically that was exactly what I was. I could now sleep soundly—if I drew the curtains against the glow of around-the-clock construction sites and floodlit cranes. • At six the following morning I was jolted awake by the sound of jackhammers. The migrant workers camping below my apartment had clocked on for the day. My back was aching from my faux-futon mattress. I tried to doze, but a cackling loudspeaker and tinny music blasted in from the high school next door. I crawled out of bed and peered out the window to bright daylight. Hundreds of students in red

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and white tracksuits were lined up at assembly on a concrete sports ground, jumping their way through early morning aerobics in time with a model student performing on a small stage at the front. It was hours before I was required at work. I boiled my battered, oversized tin kettle on the stove and made a cup of green tea, pouring the rest of the water into a thermos flask adorned with a red flower print that sat on the kitchen windowsill. Just as Zhou Mi had instructed. The thermos of hot water was a Chinese institution, and essential for getting through the day with copious refills of tea. But as I sat on the green sofa, noticing white powder falling from small cracks in the ceiling cornices, I knew that what I could have really done with right then was a cup of coffee, with milk, orange juice and maybe even some muesli. The breakfast offering in the dining hall was noodles, steamed buns, hard-boiled salty eggs and a few assorted stirfries. I was miles from the nearest Starbucks—the Sydney coffee-snob’s barrista of last resort until you found yourself suddenly caffeine deprived and in Asia. There was a drinks kiosk in the China Daily foyer. A sign said it opened at 10 a.m. and served ‘Western-style coffee’, Coca-Cola and ice cream. At 10 a.m., in desperation, I handed over the equivalent of three dollars for instant coffee served without milk. I made the door-to-door commute from my apartment to work in a personal record time of two minutes. Living at the office had its advantages, not least of which was avoiding the peak-hour traffic snarl. I was early. I knocked on the door to the editor’s office.

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‘Come in and take a seat,’ he said. He had a relaxed manner and a round, affable face that belied his age. He had worked at China Daily since its inception in 1981, was widely respected and addressed as Laoban, or Boss, by his young staff. Laoban was optimistic, worldly-wise and on a drive to raise standards. ‘We need to be independent—like the New York Times, or the Washington Post,’ he had chided his reporters in the weekly news meeting yesterday, breaking momentarily into English for my benefit. I had sat smiling, taking my place in the circle of chairs, but with no hope of keeping up with the rapid-fire dissection of the week’s economic data in Chinese. I had been discreetly told by someone else that the business press had more latitude than other media, that I would find ‘less propaganda’ here. Laoban asked me now why I had come to China. ‘China is an important trading partner for Australia. A lot of people are interested in having a better understanding of your country,’ I said. It was the business mantra of the times. Laoban nodded. ‘It will be useful to have a foreign journalist here. After a few weeks, perhaps you can provide a critique of our methods.’ I asked him who read Business Weekly. ‘A good question. It is circulated among the foreign embassies. We also assume the business community read it. But we don’t really know.’ The state-owned model of publishing had always been to print the approved material for foreigners to read, without

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too much notice of whether or not they read it. The circulation was fixed, advertisements scant and unnecessary. But the era of reform was finally catching up, and with it loomed a new need to make money. Laoban suggested that Foreign Experts could ask around and conduct a little market research. ‘You go to foreigner bars. You can ask what people think of the paper. My staff have less opportunity to meet socially with foreigners.’ The newsroom outside was beginning to fill with arriving reporters. ‘Now, you should go and communicate with your colleagues,’ he said, ushering me out the door. I took a seat in a vacant cubicle. Heads quickly appeared over the office divider, offering warm introductions to a mixture of adopted English and Chinese names. ‘I’m Big Bird. No, sorry, wrong word. That’s right—I’m Hawk!’ said my grinning neighbour, a colossus in a fashionably striped ethnic minority shirt. ‘I’m An Ling, the subeditor. You will be working closely with me,’ said a girl with a serene face and short-cropped hair. The introductions kept flowing. There were in all a dozen reporters, artists and subeditors, aged in their twenties and recruited from Chinese universities far and wide. A large map of the mainland hung on the wall and my colleagues hailed from all corners of it. Most had majored in English and been hired by China Daily upon graduation, thrown onto the job with no training. To get here took

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talent in a nation of a billion people where there was intense competition for university places, let alone employment. The younger reporters lived in the company dormitories, where two sharing was a relief after university dorms stacked with up to eight bunks. Some came from wealthy families and lived outside the compound in apartments shared with a spouse or a small white dog. A few had studied overseas at prestigious universities in the United States and Britain. It could be an awkward transition back into state-controlled media after work experience on Fleet Street. A noticeboard at the office entrance was plastered with photographs of the entire happy group, with Laoban at the centre, on a recent holiday to the seaside town of Beidaihe. I noticed that while the labourers outside wore suit jackets, inside the office, dress code was fashionable casual and coatless. When lunchtime came, we filed down to the dining hall as a work unit and ate together at one of the long tables, where bits of chicken bone, gristle and nut shell had been discarded on the tabletop by previous diners in neat, spatout piles. Not in possession of my own personal metal lunch box, I ate from a styrofoam container with disposable wooden chopsticks: fried green beans, stir-fried pork mince with fungus and, as always, rice. It was tasty but lukewarm and did not seem particularly filling. After lunch I picked up the dog-eared China Daily Style Guide I found sitting next to my computer. It was a document issued to newly arrived foreigners and designed to succinctly let them know the score.

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On page one, it spelt out that, ‘In China, consistency applies to more than spelling, particularly when policy issues are involved. For example, Taiwan is a province and an inalienable part of China.’ I read it from cover to cover, keen to avoid slipping up with a cultural clanger. I learnt that, in China, there was: Family Planning—do not use the term birth control—that allowed one child per couple; Qomolangma—the highest peak in the world . . . do not use ‘Everest’. There was the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence—an anti-colonial, anti-imperial and, originally, anti-American foreign policy term based on ‘mutual respect for territorial integrity and non-interference’. It meant everyone else should keep their nose out of China’s internal affairs—and don’t ever mention human rights. On the topic of Taiwan, there was a half-page of detailed instructions. ‘Taiwan should never be referred to in a way which might suggest it is an independent country.’ The Province of Taiwan did not have a president and parliament. These should instead be referred to always as ‘president’ and ‘parliament’, with compulsory inverted commas so as to ridicule legitimacy. According to the style guide, every reporter could use an additional two pen-names—as long as they weren’t English names—in addition to their ‘official name’. That was an awful lot of fakes, I thought. I had already noticed that the Business Weekly editorials were written under pseudonyms. An Ling offered to help me unlock the mysteries of the ancient computer system I would be working on. The job

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of the Foreign Expert Language Polisher was to pick up stories that had been written by Chinese reporters and already vetted by Chinese subeditors for sensitive policy issues, and rewrite them into readable English. The computer system was designed so that any changes made by a Foreign Expert were marked in yellow and recorded. Our performance was being monitored. It sounded simple enough. But I would soon find life a sentence-by-sentence, mind-bending battle with Chinglish as tense, pluralisation and gender escaped the youngest reporters struggling to write in a second language. Their stories ranged from analysis of grain output as the country moved from a planned to a market economy, to a weekly rollcall of world-famous brands turning up at China’s door to tout for business. The reports bristled with Chinese nationalism in the face of this new wave of foreign plunderers. Globalisation was not going to be an easy oneway street in the Middle Kingdom. I admired the spirited defence. At 5.15 p.m., which to me seemed only a few hours after lunch and barely enough time to have worked up an appetite, it was tools down again for the dinner break. Reporters who had been absent for most of the afternoon had by now returned and begun to file stories into the system. But An Ling told me to go home as they all headed for the door. ‘You work too hard!’ she laughed. They were going to play badminton after dinner, and invited me to come along. ‘We play at the court owned by the school next door. Meet you there,’ said An Ling.

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I took a dai zou or takeaway meal from the dining hall and headed back to my apartment to find some sporty clothes and shoes. When I got to my door I was astonished to see it open. Two labourers walked out of my apartment and were just as surprised to see me. They hurriedly packed up the power tools scattered around the stairwell. Tools whose long cords led to the electricity socket in my kitchen— electricity I paid for. Zhou Mi appeared from around the corner. ‘Oh. I didn’t think you were home. I thought you worked the evening shift,’ she said apologetically. The workmen were there for her. I locked the door behind all of them and got changed. When I arrived at the court the others were already playing. An Ling looked at me quizzically when I sat down on the bench to watch. ‘Where is your badminton racquet? Didn’t you bring it to China?’ ‘I don’t have one. Actually, I haven’t seen badminton being played before. I don’t know what to do.’ An Ling handed me her racquet. ‘Just hit it,’ she said, playfully throwing a shuttlecock in the air. My attempt barely made it over the net. She laughed and told me to try again. Sun Jun, a tall reporter in a white T-shirt and shorts who took his badminton seriously, walked off the court in mock disgust until our joking around was over. The sight of an ungainly laowai in jeans lunging halfheartedly after the shuttlecock raised eyebrows from the other girls as well. I was a lost cause. An Ling conceded defeat and let me sit down again.

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‘What sport do they play in Australia if they don’t know badminton?’ she asked. ‘Football, I mean rugby league. Cricket and swimming. You know, Ian Thorpe.’ No one knew league, but the Thorpedo, a hunky pinup for Chinese fans and a favourite on giant advertising billboards around Beijing that year, drew nods of recognition from everyone. • When I opened the lounge-room curtains the next morning I looked down to see the dust bowl between the apartments and the office had been transformed into a flourishing garden overnight, complete with tree saplings. A truck laden with hundreds of empty plastic flowerpots was pulling out of the compound, leaving in its wake hundreds of newly planted flowers. The riot of colour included freshly laid turf, white stones arranged in decorative rows and park benches. A water fountain danced in the centre. China Daily had scheduled the orderly arrival of spring, and like urban redevelopment everywhere in the capital, it had happened with lightning speed. There was also spring-cleaning to be done: migrant workers with ropes tied around their waists were being dangled down the side of the office building to wash windows. They had taken off their jackets. When I got to the office, I found another Foreign Expert there. Tom was a grizzly bear of a man, but a friendly Canadian bear in an oversized red and white ice-hockey shirt. Laoban said Tom was ‘a good friend of China’ because he was married to a Chinese woman and had a young son.

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It turned out that the ‘Merry Christmas’ on my apartment window was Tom’s, from two years earlier, and before his historic battle to become the first Foreign Expert allowed to move outside the China Daily compound and live in a private apartment. Tom was trying to stay in Beijing long term with his family and establish some kind of ‘normal’ life outside the restrictions of his job. I was moved from my cubicle in the newsroom to the Foreign Experts’ room. It was largely empty, with two computers and a water cooler but no telephones. My keyboard was covered with a light layer of grit that had flown in through the window above the desk, kept open in the hope of a breeze whipped up by the congested traffic outside. Across the road was the sprawling campus of the International Economics and Trade University, and there was constant honking as a tangle of taxis, cars and bicycles turned through its gates. A few people wandered in and out of the room sucking sweets and refilling green tea at the water cooler, which doubled as an urn and was rarely used for cold water— cold liquids were considered bad for the stomach. I noticed the newsroom was empty of reporters again. Journalists in Sydney spent much of their time tied to the desk phone. In Beijing, however, there was a very enticing carrot for a reporter to spend a large part of their day travelling to press conferences. Song hong bao—giving red envelopes—was endemic in China. They were offered at New Year, for weddings, on birthdays and in white envelopes for funerals. A lucky envelope with cash smoothed the way

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for the sick in hospital, so perhaps it was not surprising that it also greased the media wheel. Publicity agencies referred to it euphemistically as ‘taxi money’, presented to journalists as they left a media event. But the most expensive taxi I ever caught from the centre of Beijing to the Fourth Ring Road cost just over forty yuan, not two hundred—which I discovered was more likely to be what was inside a lucky ‘taxi’ envelope. The more realistic explanation for the practice was that it supplemented low base salaries for journalists at state-owned companies. Newspapers could not pay wages that competed with the emerging private businesses vying for the best graduates. Taxi money made the difference. That night I sat alone in my apartment on the lime green sofa with no telephone and no internet and no mindless television in my language. The repeated news headlines and travel documentaries that pumped out the same glowing vision of the nation on China Central Television’s special English channel, CCTV-9, didn’t count. I pulled out my diary, a handmade book of chalk-white pages bound in a brown cloth cover which I had carefully selected as my travelling companion in a Sydney bookstore. So far it was blank. I opened the first page and wrote in black ink, Tian ya hai jiao, followed by its English translation, ‘The end of the sky and the corner of the sea’. It was a proverb from a book I was attempting to read, and it was about being a long, long way from a remote island home.

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Two items had been brewing in my mind as essential for setting up home as a Beijing worker. By Saturday I had acquired both. I scrubbed like a mad woman to remove ‘Merry Christmas’ from the windows. A set of delicate red papercut monkeys I had found among the folk art stalls at the Panjiayuan dirt market would be its replacement. It was the Year of the Monkey and chineseastrology.com had warned I should expect the unexpected, mischievous forces were at play. It was a year of clever manipulations, problems to be sidestepped, short-lived projects and transformation. ‘Monkey years spin everyone’s concept of normal’, said the online oracle. Although I was a few months late for Chinese New Year, when papercuts were traditionally put up, gluing the soft rice-paper frames to the glass fulfilled my cinematic fantasies of what a Chinese window should look like. I was sure Zhou Mi would approve. 59

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The other item was my Beijing bicycle, parked next to the fridge. The lift lady smiled as I wheeled it up the foyer stairs and we squeezed into the elevator. ‘Laowai has been shopping again,’ she observed. She made a constant study of my comings and goings, but was mostly interested in the contents of my copious plastic bags—odd cutlery, kitchen utensils, cleaning products and far too many cushions. As the only foreigner riding her lift my strange habits were of mildly more interest than my neighbours’ gossip. ‘New?’ she asked of the bike. Rhetorically, because I was a foreigner and of course it would be new. I nodded, embarrassed. I had noticed it was the usual thing to keep shiny bicycles inside. At least, that’s what the teenage boys in my building did with their expensive, fully featured mountain bikes. Mine didn’t really fit into that category as it had been bought on special at the Japanese department store up the road, Ito Yokada, for seventeen dollars. It was inside because I was scared of not recognising it again among the mass of other ordinary silver bicycles with handlebar baskets and chain locks parked at the racks in front of our building. ‘This is not the bike for you—it is cheap,’ the teenage salesman at the store had told me sternly, wriggling its flimsy plastic seat for emphasis. But cheap sounded good to me. This was China, land of cheap manufacturing, and I wanted to make the most of it. No aspirational brands or fancy marketing tricks for this savvy consumer. He tried again to upgrade his customer

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to the hundred-dollar premium Giant brand, provincial Taiwan’s pride, but I wouldn’t budge. The seventeen-dollar special had caught my eye as I was about to leave the store’s basement supermarket with a heavy bag of groceries and a pot plant I had bought on impulse. Cycling home would save my arms the burden of the long walk back to the compound. My mind was made up—I wanted the silver special. Paying for it was a bureaucratic employment generator. The salesman wrote out details of the bike and its price on a docket. I took the docket and queued to hand over cash at a central register in a different department, where another cashier wrote out another docket in triplicate and stamped each page twice with red ink seals. I took two of the rice paper receipts back to the salesman on the floor to exchange for the goods. It was a process repeated at department stores across the city. The salesman diligently tightened the wheels, bolted on the basket and pumped up the tyres for good measure. When both tyres immediately burst, he shot me an ‘I told you so’ look through the spokes. Undeterred, I suggested we swap the wheels with those on the shocking pink special that was still on display. I wasn’t going to ride a pink bike. A small queue of families wanting to inspect Giants for their little emperor was forming behind me, but the salesman agreed to make the swap. The thought ‘cheapskate foreign student’ probably flashed through his mind. I eventually wheeled my rebirthed Beijing bicycle out onto the street. I mounted and threw myself, groceries and pot plant headlong onto the Fourth Ring Road. I pedalled

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fast and kept firmly to the right, hugging the kerb and steering as far away from the red Xiali taxis hurtling past me as I could. Unfortunately, I had not considered what might happen when it came time to stop. The brakes were barely responsive as my bicycle rolled on, alone, across the traffic at the first intersection, after I realised too late that a green light can’t have meant what I thought it did. I couldn’t make head or tail of the chaos theory that ruled Beijing roads. Luckily, everyone else was a natural at chaos, and the oncoming sedans mercifully swerved around me. My bike limped to refuge in the side lanes and I leapt off and looked back in puzzlement. Traffic lights didn’t count, it seemed. What I needed to understand was that bicycles were pack animals, and the key was to stick with the herd. The herd waited at the edge of the intersection until numbers swelled to such a point that you all surged forward together, pedestrians in tow, and stopped the oncoming traffic as one massive block. I decided it would be safer to explore Beijing at a slower, walking pace. Every morning before work, I set out through the compound gates and turned right down Huixin East Street, past the pharmacy selling loose-leaf and antler remedies weighed on scales, past the street-corner news boards where workers stood in small groups reading each page of the morning’s papers through a glass display for free, across a bridge to a riverside park.

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On hot days, a donkey would stand patiently on the bridge tied to a rough-hewn wooden cart piled high with watermelons. Horse and cart were illegal inside the Fourth Ring Road, but this peasant couple—the wife with broad red cheeks and crinkly eyes, although she was probably only in her thirties; her husband bare-chested and brown— persistently drove in and chanced it. Passing trade was guaranteed because Beijingers sucked watermelon when the temperature soared the way Australians slurped ice cream. The river was more accurately described as a sewer, but it had potential. The sludge was being dredged so that when the drought broke, water would course under the charming arched wooden footbridges that had recently been erected throughout the park. Along the riverbank, manicured lush grass, weeping willows, firs, peach and towering gingko trees provided a leafy retreat from apartment living. Dragonflies buzzed between rose beds. It was here that I discovered Beijing park life. If I was early enough, I would catch the bird men. The bird lovers—they were always men—walked their pets each morning as though they were walking a dog, striding through the streets with a covered bamboo cage. They slipped the calico cover off when they reached the park, after the cage had been carefully lifted into a tree. The bird would start to sing and whistle, encouraged by the competing songs from nearby cages in trees. The old men had silver-flecked hair and would sit on their haunches in white singlets and rolled-up grey trousers beneath the birds and similarly converse. Each cage held one precious bird, a blue and white porcelain water bowl and a sprinkle of feed. Early

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birds caught the most advantageous trees, with the most scenic aspect, brilliantly coloured flowers or highest branches. Happy birds had the loudest tune. My morning walks were always accompanied by music. When I entered the park, it was as though I was stepping into some brilliantly orchestrated stage show. The classical erhu, bamboo flute and other instruments I did not know sent haunting, piercing songs into the jade canopy as men and women sat on benches in duos, or quartets, with sheet music. Sometimes they were joined by an opera singer. The songs melded and then floated away as I wandered past on the footpath. The best acoustic position was in the unlit pedestrian tunnel that ran under the road, and it was usually taken by a folk singer. When I entered the tunnel, black closed in from all sides and it was the sound of his song exploding through my ears that drew me forward. The folk singer stood in the dark, oblivious to passersby, as he did his thing. Troupes of ballroom dancers, sword dancers and fan dancers gathered at different points along the river marked out by invisible territorial boundaries. Badminton took place under a certain tree, just a few metres along from the tai chi. The park heaved with talent and activity in the cool morning air. The smell of fresh-cut grass masked the sewer’s stench. I had never seen community spirit expressed in such an open way. People—mostly older, out of work, at home with the grandchild or retired—took obvious delight in the companionship of so many others. Australia’s parks, like the rest of its vast landscape, seemed empty by comparison.

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Back at home, I padded around my living room in a pair of the black cloth shoes that were sold everywhere— they were surprisingly soft on the soles of my feet. I triumphantly conquered the washing machine manual with my dictionary. Sheets of paper appeared every few days in the apartment building foyer, headed with the characters tong zhi, or notice, and a date. They were the modern version of the black chalkboards found in every hutong and Soviet-style apartment block around Beijing, issuing colourfully chalked messages and instructions from the local neighbourhood committee. Zhou Mi came and went, whether I was there or not, delivering more desks, taking away wardrobes, promising that ‘next week, next week’ she would arrange to have a telephone installed. From my drying room—a glass enclosure off the bedroom that had a clothes line strung across its length and windows that never fully shut so dust crept in and settled on white shirts before the moisture had time to evaporate—I could see down to a small restaurant on the street. As I hung out my laundry I watched the slop-man cycle up to the front door to collect buckets of steaming kitchen waste to be stirred into his large stinking drum and carted away, fetid goop splashing over the sides as it rocked on the back of his three-wheeled trike. A short time later, waitresses and cooks would line up on the footpath, hands clasped behind their backs, for a street-side pep talk from the boss before opening. By lunchtime there was often a red carpet rolled out so wedding parties of casually dressed family and friends

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could line up and throw rose petals and strings of red firecrackers to cheer the happy couple. I wrote in my diary: ‘Starting to slip into Beijing life, where the pace seems slower and simpler than in Sydney.’ And then I was discovered behind the stairwell cupboards by China Daily’s Foreign Expert tribe, with the cry: ‘They didn’t even tell us you were here!’ • They lived in the apartment building opposite mine over a single floor that held more in common with Melrose Place than a state-owned Chinese compound. Music blared and doors flew open and slammed shut at all hours as neighbours wandered in and out of lounge rooms, banged on the walls for quiet and played out international sporting rivalries in corridor pranks. The Foreign Experts were in fact not one but two tribes, battling out their differences in a larger than reality-TV life Survivor: One Year in Beijing. The first tribe was the university students, graduates and young reporters seeking new experiences and adventure wherever they could find it, and it just happened to be here. The second and smaller tribe was made up of jaded, world-weary veterans who had come knowing nothing of China, but with a reason to want to escape the West. The grind of faculty politics at the university; the creeping emotional backwash of a career reporting police rounds with too many dead bodies and hopeless stories; battling an ex-wife across the floor in a too-small, mid-tier newsroom full of stressed-out alcoholics and psychotics. They had responded to an internet classified

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ad, completed an email test, and the airline tickets for China had simply turned up in the mail. Distinct from Beijing’s foreign correspondent community and the city’s cashed-up multinational hot shots, they were on local salaries and effectively worked for the communist government. None spoke any Mandarin on arrival, so most lived and partied between their China Daily apartments and Sanlitun. Male Foreign Experts were a magnet for Chinese women. This year’s marriage tally already stood at two, with one baby and another cooking. There were fewer female Foreign Experts, who soon tired of the Sanlitun sleaze but consoled themselves shopping in the world’s biggest factory-direct outlet. Now I had appeared, and it was one up for the girls who had been outnumbered three to twelve. ‘Why are you staying HERE? It’s so isolated,’ said Ashley, the nineteen-year-old American intern. She offered to mount a rescue attempt. Ashley said she had been stuck in the old tower when she first arrived five months earlier, and hated it. ‘It was so cramped and full of bugs,’ she complained. ‘There was no lounge room and no one else around.’ I gently resisted her offer. Far from feeling alone, I enjoyed bumping into my Chinese neighbours and their children in the lift, and chatting in the foyer. I was in China, after all. Ashley remarked on my ‘awful’ Strine. ‘When you talk, it sounds like Kylie Minogue,’ she declared. Hardly Strine, but then Ashley had never travelled outside the United States before, so how was she to know her own broad twang wasn’t neutral? She had come to China Daily on a

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university exchange, thinking it would be a fun way to earn a semester’s credit points. Instead, she had fallen behind on the essays she was supposed to write because of the long shifts she’d been rostered. And she was finding the outside world a tougher proposition than her cloistered college dorm back home. The biggest scar on Ashley’s impression of Beijing was her hair. Her long brown locks had been hacked up to ear level, on one side only, by a hairdresser who had mistakenly thought all American teenagers wanted to be street cool. He then suggested she dye it purple, and saw his client dissolve into tears in front of the mirror. Ashley covered her bad hair year with a ponytail and American teen sass. Nikki was a twenty-three-year-old Canadian who had arrived after a stint at a newsletter in Israel, her first job out of university. She had long blonde hair, blue eyes and looked intimidatingly well-dressed. Until she spilt the beans that she was the queen of shopping for fakes. When it got too much, Nikki never lost her cool, she just shut out the world with an iPod. Chloe said she was Canadian too, from a city where it was bleak to be young and unemployed. Jobs in Canada were hard to find, rents hard to pay, and the media impossible to crack. She was twenty-four, tall and thin, with short dark hair and a dolphin tattoo on her bicep. Chloe invariably wore black, favoured metal studs and was married. Her dolphin was kept covered in the office because she had discovered China was conservative about these things. She told me that she had been heart-broken when an older colleague, with whom she had gotten along

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famously, had frozen her out after meeting her husband’s tattoos. Ralph was a stocky Scot with a number-two buzz cut and limbs covered in swirling patterns of Celtic ink. He was working as an English teacher and his class of Chinese kindergarten kids adored their ‘cartoon man’, regardless of what China Daily management thought. But everywhere he went outside the classroom, people stared. Ralph could stop traffic. The Foreign Expert rules dictated that contracts lasted only a year, and on the rare occasion two—if you became indispensable or had a Chinese baby. But most were escorted to the airport by the Foreign Affairs Office the day after their last shift. Old Chen’s explanation for the twelve-month limit had been that if foreigners stayed too long in China their English deteriorated and they were of less use to the paper. No matter how thick the Chinglish flew, I found this unlikely. More probable was that China Daily did not want an entrenched foreign influence. The Foreign Experts were essential to the paper’s production, but were kept at its periphery. So it was a constant throughout the year—foreigners would suddenly appear and then, twelve months later, disappear. Like some television game show, but with the farewell more Big Brother intervention than voted-off-theisland. I was just the latest arrival to the house.

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5. Dragon Gorge Dragon Gorge

The next weekend coincided with the monthly Foreign Expert excursion. China Daily was sending us by bus to Dragon Gorge, ninety kilometres northwest in Yanqing county. Excursions were part of the routine of a worker’s life at a benevolent state-owned enterprise, and the noticeboard in the China Daily foyer was plastered with snapshots of work units sightseeing together or posing in company T-shirts. I couldn’t imagine the stubborn individualists back home taking time out from their private weekend lives to go cheerfully cherry picking en masse with management. But then I couldn’t see them trouping off to play badminton after eating dinner together each night either. Dragon Gorge was a theoretical two-hour drive through dusty, barren fields and past the optimistically named but deserted ‘Happy Hotel’ in the middle of nowhere. We had been promised a lake of striking beauty. We instead found a giant yellow plastic dragon. The dragon’s mouth opened to reveal an escalator that carried visitors 70

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up the side of a mountain, thus avoiding the inconvenience of walking. The dragon was, in fact, the longest escalator ride in the world, and an entry in the Guinness Book of Records proved it. The yellow beast’s belly formed a tunnel with windows that looked down onto a series of dams. I could see uniformed men moving around in a clearing. ‘Are they soldiers?’ I asked An Ling, who had come along for the daytrip. ‘Not soldiers,’ she shot back. Maintenance workers then. I worried myself with my question. I had been in Beijing just over a fortnight and was already assuming I was more likely to see the military than plumbers. That the PLA even had their own television channel, complete with uniformed weathergirls and game show hosts, only fuelled my creeping sense of Beijing paranoia. The entrance to a smaller tunnel branching off to the dragon’s side promised dazzling lights and an underground zoo, for a small additional fee. ‘I think we can avoid paying to watch sad, incarcerated cave-dwelling animals,’ said Nikki. ‘Can’t wait to see what local governments come up with to entertain the masses during the Olympics,’ Chloe groaned. We emerged on the other side of the mountain to find a long pool of jade twisting off into the distance. Icebergs floated at the water’s edge, a reminder that I had narrowly avoided the tail of a harsh winter. Cherry blossoms drifted down like snow to sprinkle its glassy surface. It was visual magic. Until the boats came into view. They ploughed the

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water, loudspeakers screeching commentary to Chinese tour groups on animal-shaped rock formations in the cliffs. We were herded onto the next open-top vessel to dock and landed at the far shore of the gorge twenty minutes later. ‘Two hours we return,’ the guide announced. Until then, we were marooned in a playground of kitsch. A web of bungee and flying fox ropes straddled the airspace. Souvenir stalls selling beads, toys and other plastic junk crowded the paths. But on a peak high above the flying circus sat a simple wooden pagoda. A place to contemplate unadulterated nature, if you could reach it. Ting Ting and Ashley raced up the mountain path with the boys, seemingly without breaking sweat. Halfway, I was out of breath and questioning whether any view could be worth it. Chinese mountains were indeed poetic, the exact image of a scroll painting. It was the same artistic cragginess that made them such a bitch to climb. The ground continually slid away beneath me, spraying dust that parched my throat and got up my nose. Nikki was wearing new-season thongs, or flip-flops as she called them, and they were flipping and flopping off the side of her foot as she struggled up an almost vertical path, clutching at tree branches. I felt my face glowing bright pink, despite the sunscreen I had slavishly applied in the boat. I pulled out the tube I’d bought at the local supermarket. ‘It won’t work,’ said Nikki. ‘All the sunscreens here have whitening agent in them. They don’t block the sun for fair skin.’ It turned out the best local sunscreen was an umbrella.

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At the top of the mountain I took refuge under the pagoda and drained the last drops of warm water from my drinking bottle. Ting Ting, fresh and perfect, was sitting with a mysterious tall and pale Chinese boy clad in black. He’d travelled with us on the bus, but had not been introduced. She seemed relaxed and, away from the compound, had thawed from the ice queen I’d met when I first arrived. An Ling joined me in the shade on the pagoda bench. ‘Have you seen Joe?’ she asked quietly. ‘I don’t think he wanted to climb,’ I told her. Joe was a fluorescent-white Canadian sports journalist who’d been a horseracing columnist before stepping into his role as China Daily’s editorial polisher. He was a large man, in his late forties, with a booming voice and an even bigger personality. Like most of the male Foreign Experts, he was a babe magnet in Beijing. I’d met him at lunch earlier in the week and, when I’d returned to the office, noticed An Ling look up from her cubicle. She had sat next to him on the bus today, and spent most of her time walking and talking with him. But Joe wasn’t about to go scrambling up mountains. From this height, the gorge was revealed in all its glory: a snaking green dragon framed by white cherry blossoms. The Foreign Experts took photos of the view, while An Ling took photos of the Foreign Experts. The Chinese amateur photographer’s creed was that unpeopled landscapes were boring. After a race back down to the water, Ashley and Nikki went in search of a toilet. They discovered a hut discreetly distanced from the main path to keep the stench at bay,

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but took one look inside and retreated in disgust. Relief could wait. Because the yellow dragon escalator was a one-way dragon, our return from the gorge involved a bobsled ride. The carpark restaurant provided another chance for a pee stop. The queue of waiting women stretched out the door. Nikki went first, pulling a little bottle of disinfectant hand gel from her handbag. ‘Indispensable when venturing outside the city,’ she said. But when it came Ashley’s turn, she baulked again. ‘It’s not hygienic,’ she declared, refusing to follow the example of hitching trousers up to the knees, before wading into a room sloshing with water. I had thought the facilities rather reasonable for a Chinese lavatory. A row of doors opened to cubicles where you could squat in privacy. Every now and then the toilet attendant would flush the trough that ran the length of the room, and a tide of water would course along it and carry the shit and piss and other refuse away. The flushing kept the air almost breathable, and the diligent attendant, who spent most of her day in the room with a mop and bucket, constantly washed down the white tiled floor and the muddy footprints trudged in from the gorge. The water seeped out under the door and into the restaurant’s green carpet. We were five hours into our excursion and still had to drive home. I wondered how long Ashley could last. Repeat exposure to horror Chinese toilets had necessarily conditioned my body to perform minor feats in self-denial. I had once managed a thirty-six-hour train journey without

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major movement. It was an issue of paper. Long-distance trains were actually among the safest Chinese toilet encounters, as most had officious uniformed cleaners assigned to each carriage. Unfortunately, I hadn’t discovered this in time to avoid my Worst Chinese Toilet Encounter. It happened at a train station in Guilin, reputedly the nation’s ‘number one mountain and river beauty spot’. The station itself was perfectly civilised, with a large waiting hall of plastic seats and a free public urn to refill the ubiquitous flask of traveller’s green tea. After an hour’s wait for an overdue train, I had wandered off in the direction of the toilet. I found the ce suo sign, but noticed there was no room attendant, or even a door to the room. I recklessly pushed on. Stepping through the entrance I saw that the taps on the washbasin had been snapped off. Muddy footprints smattered the floor. Another step and the stench hit me even before I had turned to see the real source of the footprints. A row of three cubicles had the doors ripped off and piles of faeces filled each squattie, rising in mounds where there should have been holes. They were beyond cleaning, so had been left for the flies and maggots. A middle-aged woman wearing the bright floral jacket favoured by destitute farmers crouched in the corner of one of the cubicles and looked up at me with interest. I was going to vomit and fled. My Second Worst Chinese Toilet Encounter was partly self-inflicted. I was stuck on a boat where the second-class toilet was a windowless communal room with a rusting metal floor that had four grotty holes cut in it. No cubicles and no privacy. There was a nu female character painted

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above the door. I walked in and tried to use it, to get the ‘authentic’ river experience. But when I entered the room, everyone looked up and stared intently at the only foreign girl on the boat. They were waiting for me to drop my trousers. We’d be hanging out together for the next three days, so there was zero chance of anonymity. I couldn’t even unzip. I ran out and paid the boat’s captain a hundred dollars to upgrade to the empty first-class cabin, because it came with its own key-locked portaloo. The second-class dorms had the same card tables and TVs, so it was only the crapper that set first class apart. Within half an hour of being handed the keys, I somehow managed to lock myself out of my posh dunny. I cried when the captain told me I’d have to wait until the following morning to use it, no refunds, because we wouldn’t find a locksmith until the next refuelling port. I sat tight for another night. The story spread around the boat and was considered both hilarious and strange—foreigners and their bathroom hang-ups! The little old man with the red book and Mao suit in my old dorm patted my arm in sympathy. My Third Worst Chinese Toilet Encounter caught me off guard. It was at a small museum. A row of five vacant cubicles held a treasure at the end—a Western-style toilet. I was so taken by the full-length door and the high walls around me that I relaxed, and failed to notice the toilet door didn’t have a latch. A short, round woman in a red tour group cap barged into the cubicle. Instead of realising her mistake and backing out, she stood there and screamed in surprise. Six more round women in red tour group caps came rushing in to join her. They all screamed. I screamed back.

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Expats in China could spend weeks talking about toilet experiences. My other encounters had ranged from the grityour-teeth endurable to the luxuriously over the top. The roadside service station standard was a room-length trough with knee-high walls. Archaeologists claim to have discovered evidence that China invented the toilet, after opening a 2000-year-old tomb and finding a stone throne with piped water. But that was probably the last time most public toilets had been cleaned. Tourism authorities conceded a third of complaints from foreign visitors sprung from bathroom angst, brought on by maggots, lack of privacy and staring. The Three Year Plan to Renovate the Public Bathrooms at Scenic Attractions was embarked on in the late 1990s, and marked the first effort to flush away the problem. Conscious of the nation’s spreading reputation for bathroom atrocities, efforts had recently been stepped up in anticipation of the 2008 Olympics. A toilet star-rating system had been put in place. Beijing was due to host the fourth session of the World Toilet Summit later in the year. In preparation, the city government had vowed to build seven hundred star-rated toilets over three years, including sixty-four four-star toilets with heated towels, 197 three-star toilets and 118 one-star toilets. Already at the entombed warriors museum in Xian, you could safely lick the floor and the sparkling rows of selfflushing Western thrones. Four-star toilets in Shanghai featured photography exhibitions to distract queuing patrons, while at Beijing’s Summer Palace, a porcelain goldfish pond

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and antique rocking chairs in the waiting room created visual harmony. But it wasn’t just foreign tourists who suffered. Most hutong homes didn’t have plumbing and China Daily carried reports of people falling into neighbourhood cesspits at night and even breaking limbs. So the city had promised these, too, would be gradually knocked down and another four hundred ‘standard’ toilets built every year leading up to the Olympics. Facilities at state-owned enterprises were better, but still humble. China Daily provided one male and one female bathroom for the entire building. Each held a Western-style cubicle at the end of a row of three squatties. The cubicle doors were usually shut, but sometimes not, because old habits died hard. The cleaning lady burnt a stick of incense each day to tame odours. While there was often hand soap, there was never toilet paper. This meant remembering to keep some in your handbag, or your pockets scattered with tissues, if you wanted to avoid the embarrassment that came with the less discreet rolls of paper stored on, or under, the office desk. The highway back to Beijing was clogged by a horrendous weekend traffic jam. Blue trucks, tour coaches and cars crawled along as urban families returned in their new sedans and 4WDs from country outings or loaded up with furniture from the homemaker supercentres that ringed the city. Up the back of the bus, Ashley had grown uncharacteristically quiet as we jolted along potholed country roads. She finally got up and eased her way slowly down to the front to discreetly ask Ting Ting to ask the Foreign Affairs

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Office to ask the bus driver to pull over so she could run behind a tree. They did, but the bus driver refused. He couldn’t see any way out of the lane to the edge of the freeway, and was not willing to lose his place in the queue back into Beijing. Returning to her seat, Ashley called a Foreign Expert crisis meeting. ‘I can’t hold it,’ she whimpered forlornly. If that was the case, there was no other choice. She would have to piss on the bus. The boys deserted the back seat. A scramble through daypacks came up with two options: weeing into a plastic supermarket bag or an empty Pringles can. ‘At least the Pringles can won’t leak,’ I suggested. Ashley climbed onto the back seat and crouched over the can as we made loud conversation and looked the other way. The astonished Chinese passengers in a passing tour coach didn’t. I stifled a giggle at the sight of their faces pressed to the window as the bus overtook us in the next lane. ‘OK. It’s over,’ Ashley announced. She dropped the Pringles can discreetly to the floor and abandoned the now damp back row. ‘I can’t believe you just did that,’ said Nikki, who had moved well away and was reaching for her iPod. ‘What else could I do?’ Ashley snapped back. Chloe sympathised and said that it would have been easier for a guy. The bus suddenly braked. The Pringles can tipped over. Clear liquid sped down the aisle, heading fast for the front of the bus where Old Chen was sitting with his wife and

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other company officials, oblivious. It was a potential disaster, an impending massive loss of face for the entire foreign tribe. Alex, a quick-thinking British exchange student from a prestigious London university, pulled a half-drunk Sprite bottle from his bag, unscrewed the lid and hurled it down the aisle after Ashley’s pee. ‘Sorry,’ he called out. The decoy was too much, and despite Ashley’s indignation, everyone burst into hysterical fits of laughter. My sides hurt and tears rolled down my face. I found laughter a frequent pressure valve in China. You had to. But Ashley was angry. Nikki retreated to her iPod, and refused to speak to anyone for the rest of the way home. As she glared out the window through dark sunglasses I could see she was wishing she wasn’t here, in China, where bodily functions broke the thin veneer of faux designer lifestyle she had carefully built around herself. • That evening was my first China Daily night on the town, a regular Foreign Expert excursion in which the Foreign Affairs Office had no involvement. Gus, the Argentinean Foreign Expert and de facto social organiser for the group, had arranged a big dinner with the broader social clique of Beijing’s young propaganda polishers. A trail of twentysomethings who had developed a taste for life in the city were moving through a string of jobs at China Daily, China Central Television, China Radio and the Xinhua News Agency. They had found a way to beat the twelve-month contract rule. If Sanlitun was the foreigner’s bar street, the Qianhai and Houhai lakes were where the rest of Beijing came for

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night-life. The city’s lakes had been used as a playground for centuries, since before Ming times. The murky green water was crowded with rowing boats on hot summer days and ice-skating in winter, while middle-aged men in rubber caps and Speedos swam like slow, bloated turtles year-round for good health. The old people set up folding tables along the southwest shore of the lake front by day, forming open-air mahjong dens. It was a serious and frantic pace of play as the mahjong tiles chirped in the hands of wily masters. But the public space around the lakes for such ancient pursuits was shrinking. Bars edged ever further around the shore, outdoing one another with vibrant decoration, hip music and fat sofas from which to sit and admire the sunset. The trend spilt into the hutongs behind the bars, where luxury residences could now be found on prime real estate that had previously been regarded as a quaint slum. Waterfront courtyard homes in the area had sprouted double garages, driveways and basketball hoops, pricing out the ordinary Beijingers who had been shifted into high-rise living. The lake’s premium bar strip was Lotus Lane, where the young Beijing professionals who could afford it dined at candlelit tables. Gus had booked a private room in the Hakka restaurant opposite Lotus Lane, where the waitresses dressed in blue and white cotton batik. We bundled into a convoy of taxis hailed outside the compound gate and pulled up ten minutes later at Houhai. I was delighted to find a waltzing sea of middle-aged dancers. While their children spent big at the swanky bars, nightfall brought the older generation out to a public square at Lotus

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Lane’s entrance with portable tape decks, sometimes in pyjamas, to dance their hearts out under the moon. It was a gorgeous sight. The restaurant was extremely popular, and we had been lucky to score a long wooden table and benches in a private room with a view over the lights on the water. I sat down among a group of English and American girls as arms waved down the table and fingers clicked confidently in the air for ‘xiao jie, xiao jie—miss, miss’, to bring more beer. ‘Does this have meat in it?’ asked the fine-boned girl sitting next to me of the pigtailed waitress. She was pointing to an exotically named ‘lotus and lily’ dish on the menu. ‘Lotus is vegetable,’ came the curt reply. ‘Yes, but is there also any meat?’ The waitress shook her head at the fussy eater. But when it was served, the lotus contained the ubiquitous ground pork mince vegetarians struggled daily to avoid. My neighbour sighed and ate a steamed plate of greens instead. I pitied her missing out on the delicious dishes that were being shared around the table, as a warm glow of beer and chatter filled the room. A vibrant American girl sitting across the table pushed her card into my hand. She said she was the editor of a new lifestyle magazine. Old Chen grumpily referred to such publications as ‘illegal’, because they were privately owned. But their popularity had forced the state-owned company to follow the ground they had broken with its own weekend lifestyle paper. The centre of attention at dinner that night were two English girls who had moved on from their stint at China

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Daily the previous year to land plumb television roles. CCTV-9 may have been the niche English-language channel in a land of a billion Chinese speakers, but it was the kind of minor stardom and career kick-start that most graduates couldn’t dream of in the cutthroat world of broadcasting back home. Foreign faces on news broadcasts was a relatively new phenomenon, even for CCTV-9. A veteran Australian broadcaster had become the first non-Chinese news anchor on the channel that year, as CCTV began to take its first steps in a makeover that took more than a little influence from CNN. Bianca had corkscrew golden curls springing down her back and big blue eyes. The Chinese loved her, and she had found herself presenting the evening sports show. Margaret was a daytime news announcer with perfectly enunciated vowels. She was worshipped by the China Daily boys. Elegant but down to earth, she boasted that her outfit for the night had cost no more than thirty yuan. The girls around the table were on a constant quest to buy clothes as cheaply as possible. It had become a badge of clever thrift, of becoming a Beijing local, albeit in an XL size. ‘I like the skirt,’ one commented. Margaret laughed and told her, ‘You, too, can buy this skirt. In fact, you will.’ It was true. Every month there would be one fantastic item of clothing, whether it came off the back of a truck or was surplus to some overseas retailer’s order, that swept the market stalls and neighbourhood boutiques. Soon everyone in your compound or work unit was wearing it. Because Beijing girls often had just one or two sets of clothes that they wore for days on end, there was no chance

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of avoiding a wardrobe clash. So no one cared. It was liberating. The bill was divided and Gus and Alex collected me from the end of the table. We were going to Sanlitun, they announced, because it was an initiation rite for all new China Daily arrivals. The sleaze was in full swing at midnight and the choking air in the tiny bars had forced punters out into South Street, making it almost impassable to cars. I stood on the road drinking vodka and orange cordial in a plastic cup. Groups of German and American businessmen slurred and swayed through the crowd hoisting bottles of bourbon. Backpackers formed circles drinking Tsingtao beer. A black motorcycle with sidecar rumbled past, carrying a long-haired Chinese rocker and his bandana-wearing girl up to the next bar. Band members hauled their instruments out of clubs, where the music was barely audible above the roar of a hundred drunken conversations. Chloe and tattooed Ralph arrived with another armful of beer. ‘Try this instead,’ said Alex, producing a small green bottle of baijiu—white sorghum spirit. ‘Arrgh,’ I gasped as it hit the back of my throat. Ralph told me what was likely to unfold that night— every night was groundhog night in Beijing. The boys had made Sanlitun their second home and would keep drinking into the small hours, talking crap and descending to filthier bars until they reached Maggies, more commonly referred to as the Mongolian brothel. They didn’t go there for sex, it was just that it was open and served beer. And somewhere along the path to Maggies they would have found a ‘sleep-

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over’ pal for the night—if they were looking. If not, they would stagger through the China Daily gates as the sun rose. Gus was on first-name terms with the guards. ‘Some of these guys have literally slept with hundreds of women since arriving in China. They don’t even have to try,’ said Ralph, waving his arm around the crowded street. He advised, ‘Come to Poachers, it’s fun, but don’t stay on to Maggies.’ Later that night, but not too late, I shouted my destination to a taxi driver: ‘Zhong Guo Ri Bao.’ I never did quite get the ‘rrr’ bit right. ‘Shenme?’ The taxi driver didn’t speak English, so hadn’t heard of the newspaper, even by its Chinese name. Why would he? I gave him the address instead. ‘Huixin’ meant ‘favours the new’, but if I got my tones wrong I’d be telling the driver I lived on disappointment street. I directed the taxi along the Second Ring Road, turn here, past the Sino–Japanese Friendship Hospital. Bugger. We had shot through to the Fourth Ring Road. I hadn’t seen home anywhere. They must have switched off the neon sign above the office. It was really dark and I had no idea where I was. The taxi drove patiently back along Huixin East Street, while I craned my neck out the window. I gave up and got out at a hotel I knew was a block or so down from our compound and walked the rest. I cut around to the side entrance closest to my apartment block, but found the gate was locked. Bugger, bugger. It was way too high to climb. I contemplated sleeping in the street, but tried the main gate instead. It was open, and the guards were dozing. I had beaten the sun home.

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There was a white wire that ran from the telephone handset in my living room, up the wall, past the bathroom, out the door, across the stairwell, around the corner, down the corridor and into a box. It had appeared two weeks after I moved in, and meant I could finally use the phone. I was doubtful that this was its only purpose. I was puzzled when Zhou Mi told me the phone sockets already built into the living room and bedroom walls in the apartment were no good. I would instead have to wait for someone to come and install a line, she said. The man in the blue uniform finally did come one afternoon. After he’d left, I followed the white wire like Alice and her white rabbit. But when I reached the end, instead of being curious, I was just suspicious of the box. Rumours of phone-tapping swirled through Beijing’s foreign community. Or was it just Beijing paranoia? • 86

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The dining hall’s constant menu of rice had begun to taste a little monotonous to someone used to rotating the Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, Italian and Greek takeaway flyers on the fridge when dialling a Modern Australian dinner in Sydney. So I was happy to hear Sun Jun, a reporter who lived outside the compound with his white dog Lili, admit that he could afford to eat elsewhere. The neighbourhood was brimming with interesting restaurants and tea-houses that offered regional, if not continental, variations in cuisine. We lunched with Tom at a small duck restaurant up the road that had just opened. It boasted ba bao cha, eight treasure tea, poured from a pot with a foot-long copper spout by a boy in black silk pyjamas with red pom poms on his head. As the cup was refilled during the meal, the flavour profile shifted subtly from bitter to sweet. The restaurant entrance was still festooned with large bouquets of ‘new opening’ flowers and red ribbon. Sun Jun towered over Tom and had a long black fringe that flopped across his high forehead. He was a perfectionist who had studied for his masters degree at a university in America, although his family were still in Yunnan province. He lived alone in Beijing and had a photo of Lili pinned above his desk where older reporters had wedding photos. Over lunch we talked about our travel plans for the upcoming public holiday. Tom wanted to go to Korea, but had given up in frustration. ‘The travel agent insists that to go to Korea I have to go shopping,’ he said.

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It was easier for Chinese citizens to travel overseas if they joined a group tour. This was how the Chinese Government, travel agencies and visa-issuing offices liked it. Tom wanted to vacation with his Chinese family, so had pulled together a small band of friends prepared to form a tour group. But the travel agent had refused to cater to their interests, and wouldn’t budge from a fixed itinerary that revolved around retailers that would provide kickbacks to the guides. Tom couldn’t see the point of travelling that far to be locked inside a shopping mall. Sun Jun said he wanted to go to Vietnam, but didn’t know whether he would make it there this year. ‘I was in Vietnam a few years ago,’ I enthused. ‘It’s great. You have to go to the northern highlands. The hill tribe villagers wear the most amazing hand-embroidered clothing. It’s a really authentic atmosphere. Even in Hanoi you see conical hats and women cycling by in graceful silk aodai. Not like so much of Asia these days, where you might as well be anywhere in the world.’ I had broken into backpacker babble. ‘She thinks you should all be running around in “authentic” Disneyland theme costumes,’ Tom told Sun Jun, raising his eyebrows. Sun Jun laughed. The comment caught me by surprise. We were talking tourism; shopping cultures. Why else travel if it wasn’t to look for something different to what you found at home? The Chinese and Canadians were just as guilty of it walking along Bondi Beach staring at bikinis as I was bargaining for cushion covers with Hmong girls in Sapa.

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‘That’s not what I meant,’ I said, trying to dig myself out of a hole. ‘I just think it’s a relief to find pockets of the world that still hold on to different traditions. Where you can see it, and it isn’t just more of the same globalised monoculture.’ It had been my first sight of a city still reminiscent of old Peking, the mist curling around peaked roofs in the morning, the glow of wok fires through the hutongs at night, that had sparked my whole China thing. It was something unknown. ‘I don’t mind globalisation and I’m happy that Beijing is modernising. It makes my life easier,’ said Sun Jun. He was curious to see how communist Vietnam was handling it, too. I couldn’t imagine this smart young professional, who always wore a crisp-collared blue shirt to the office, sporting a Manchu pigtail or even an ‘authentic’ Mao jacket. I felt a little stupid. I guess it would be like expecting Australians to wear stubbies and thongs for all eternity in the interests of global diversity. These days, young Australians and Chinese dressed exactly alike, but it didn’t follow that our cultures were. You had to look more closely than that. Sun Jun pulled a book from his bag. It was a copy of The Crazed, a novel by the exiled writer Ha Jin. One of the Foreign Experts had recommended it. On the cover was a battered wicker chair almost identical to the chair in my apartment. The book was set against the backdrop of the Tiananmen events of 1989, and had won acclaim in the West for its story of a professor recovering from a stroke and trying to remember the truth.

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‘Can I borrow that?’ I asked. Ha Jin’s books were officially banned on the mainland. This didn’t necessarily mean you couldn’t find them. Even smuggled copies of The Tiananmen Papers circulated among private lounge rooms. Banned status could add greatly to a book’s allure. I had been told by the head of a mainland book publishing house, a former soldier who was simply assigned there, that a decision by the censors to ban a title already on the shelves could often be a great marketing coup. It was guaranteed to boost sales and notoriety for a new wave of racy and sexually explicit pulp fiction. But none of this impressed Sun Jun, who said he had found the book boring. ‘I didn’t actually finish it,’ he said sheepishly. ‘This sort of thing is not as interesting if you were here and grew up with it, I think.’ Tom shrugged. The conversation moved on to computer games Sun Jun had downloaded from the internet. • The CCTV news bulletin that evening had a sting in the tail. SARS had reappeared in Beijing. There was one fullblown case and another seven people who had been in contact with the victim were also showing symptoms. The details were brief and the item had been buried near the end of the bulletin, more of a whisper than a shout. Western media would have been screaming out: SARS BACK! But in China such things were controlled by a government obsessed with avoiding public panic. Besides, the nightly news was always led by President Hu Jintao or Premier Wen Jiabao shaking hands with a daily rollcall of visiting international dignitaries who wanted to forge greater economic

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ties with the rising dragon and affirm the One China policy. This night it was the North Korean despot Kim Jong Il, who had arrived secretly in Beijing by private train. Tom warned me about the SARS story at work the next day. He was sitting in front of an open window and scouring the web for any additional information. ‘Until we know more, be very careful,’ he said, and then tactfully coughed for the rest of the afternoon. It was almost a year since the virus had made its devastating debut in Beijing. And once again it was the eve of one of the biggest travel migrations across China. The May Week holiday would start in seven days. The previous year, a retired China Daily worker had died of SARS and another staff member was hospitalised. Foreign Experts were quarantined in their apartments for weeks. The gates to the school next door had been padlocked shut to stop students from leaving. Taxis refused to come along the street because the Sino–Japanese Friendship Hospital, a few blocks from the compound, had been one of the major SARS treatment sites. As panic set in, one Foreign Expert broke her contract and fled to Singapore. Tom said this had puzzled many people, since Singapore was in the grip of its own SARS crisis. The next evening’s television news gave more details about the current outbreak. It was spreading. A researcher at the Beijing Institute of Virology had died and, tragically, had killed her mother by travelling home by train to Anhui province with ‘the flu’. Over a hundred people were now in quarantine. White masks began to reappear on the streets.

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The Beijing City Government had been spectacularly exposed following the SARS cover-up in 2003. A retired military doctor blew the whistle to the international media after the health minister claimed there was no epidemic in the capital and only a handful of SARS cases. The doctor revealed that Beijing hospitals had been told to hide SARS patients. The Chinese media hadn’t dared to report the scandal, because revealing state secrets was a crime. When it was confirmed there were over 1000 SARS patients, Beijing’s mayor and the health minister were quickly and publicly sacked. ‘Killing a chicken to frighten the monkeys’ is the old Chinese phrase for finding a scapegoat. Blanket media coverage of the valiant fight to control SARS ensued. Much later, when the international attention had moved on, the doctor quietly disappeared. Given this track record, it wasn’t surprising that people were sceptical of the SARS information being reported the second time around. So a year on, the government was striving to show that things had changed. Health officials held daily briefings on the infection tally for television crews outside the main hospital. Men in white clean-suits began walking through the China Daily offices each afternoon, spraying disinfectant in the air during the meal break. The weather turned cold and wet, transforming Beijing’s dust into sticky yellow mud. Tom came into the office on Monday morning with a shocking story about the attempted kidnap of his niece. He had taken his son and niece to the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park that weekend. It was a theme

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world where people dressed in Disney-style ethnic-minority costumes danced in replica villages for Han Chinese tourists. The family had been engrossed watching a stage show when Tom looked down to see his niece gone. He looked up to see the toddler being led off into the distance by an old woman. Tom chased through the crowd and grabbed the three year old back. He told me he was so shaken that he just yelled at the old crow as she ran off laughing. ‘I should have stopped her and taken her to the police. She’ll do it again. She’ll take someone else’s child,’ he said. Girl kidnapping in China was well documented, and blamed on the gender imbalance in rural areas that had resulted from decades of the One Child Policy, and the preference for sons. Female babies were frequently aborted. Ironically, women were now becoming as rare as hen’s teeth. The situation was causing some farmers to go to extreme measures to find a wife. Tom had never imagined it could touch his family. Deadly viruses and conversations about kidnapping. Beijing office life was becoming surreal. • Even before I arrived in the compound, I had known that working in the media in China would be different. That was part of the attraction: the chance to look back out at the world through Chinese eyes. I had been aware that I would be working inside the communist propaganda machine. Propaganda was not the dirty word we use in the West, instead it was what the media had been built for. In Mao Zedong wisdom, the Communist Party’s power came not only from the barrel of the gun, but also the pen. And

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despite the rapid economic change in China it was the government’s propaganda officials that still held ultimate authority over newspapers. The Party wasn’t letting go of either the gun or the pen. I thought that if I could toe the line, just for three months, I would perhaps learn to understand China a little better. But there is a difference between knowing what you are letting yourself in for, and how you actually react when you find yourself there. My first encounters with censorship highlighted just how confusing the propaganda rules could be, even when you were trying to toe the line. Broadly, there were certain topics that were clearly out of bounds and not to be mentioned, or only along strict government lines. Falun Gong, Tibet, Tiananmen, Taiwan, et cetera. Other banned topics came and went and senior editors kept their finger on the pulse of the political mood, assisted by word from the government’s propaganda department. If editors were unsure, they waited for further instructions before publishing. China’s media regulations stated that no publication could undermine Marxism, Mao Zedong Thought or Deng Xiaoping Theory, interfere with the work of the Party, harm the nation’s honour or disturb social stability. Day to day, many stories weren’t affected. But when anything looked like it could be, reporters knew to play it safe and err on the side of self-censorship. As the deadline crunch loomed, messages shot back and forth between the newsroom and Foreign Experts, as we coaxed stories into coherent English. ‘Milk is not measured in kilograms . . .’

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‘But that is what the spokesman said!’ ‘Do you mean trade deficit? You have written trade surplus, or in fact trade surpass. This is different . . .’ Then came a question to which I could give no answer. ‘Is this paragraph too sensitive to print?’ The message was from a reporter who had trained overseas and had a keen news nose and an eye for a controversial angle. The story in question quoted an anonymous source who suggested China’s unwillingness to open its borders to neighbours because of security fears could damage a regional trade initiative. My instincts as a Western journalist said leave it in. My position as a Foreign Expert meant I couldn’t say anything. The report quoted an unofficial source, potentially damaged the nation’s glory and contradicted government policy. But at the same time, it was a business story and the government was encouraging rigorous debate on business matters to weed out corruption and promote competition. It was a question that needed a Chinese perspective. As it turned out, the comment stayed in. It was a different story when it came to a topic clearly on the banned thoughts list: wang ba or internet cafes. Beijing once had tens of thousands of small internet cafes. You could find them in cities and towns across China. I remembered walking through the red-light district of Xian on my way back to a hotel in 2002 and passing internet cafes packed with kids reading email, surfing the web and playing computer games. It seemed more constructive than loitering after dark on streets that were lined with twentyfour-hour ‘hairdressers’, a common front for brothels.

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A tragic fire in a Beijing wang ba a few months later killed scores of young gamers who had been locked inside overnight—they had wanted to keep on playing until dawn and the owner had gone home to bed. In the aftermath, internet cafes across the city were shut down and could not reopen until a strict new licensing regime came into force. So, despite being across the road from a university, I had to walk half an hour to the Third Ring Road if I wanted to get online, privately, outside the office. The wang ba was cavernous, but to get in I needed to show either a resident’s card or passport. My name and number were recorded in a logbook, and sophisticated software monitored the websites I visited. The internet provided far less anonymity in China, where websites were routinely blocked at the border and thousands of cybercops patrolled and screened email, instant messages and SMS for errant words and thoughts, like ‘democracy’. Unfortunately, Western technology companies were complicit in the cyber suppression. It was bizarre to be completely surrounded by adults absorbed in online games. Not a teenage boy in sight. This strange scene was later explained as I read through a Business Weekly report: children and teenagers were no longer allowed in. More than 8600 internet cafes had been shut down in the past three months for illegally admitting under-eighteens. There had been a rising crescendo in the official media of late about teenagers driven to mental illness by the internet and excessive online gaming. It was a campaign and, predictably, the story in front of me opened with a

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mother expressing her delight over the government’s decision to close all of the internet cafes near her son’s school. She said they had distracted him from his studies and had caused his grades to plummet. The grammar wasn’t quite right. I tweaked and polished to correctly recite the government line. With my help, the story now warned of the dangers that lurked online, and of unhealthy information that could poison young minds. For my efforts, I felt like crap. I had seen how empowering the internet could really be for teenagers. The web was something that belonged to their generation. The reality of propaganda, and the consequences for readers, was beginning to sink in. I kept reading. Midway, the report abruptly changed tune. It criticised the campaign against the internet as being irrational. Two independent ‘experts’ declared the government’s decision to bar schoolchildren from internet cafes was ‘extreme’. They said it would create an underclass of children without computer skills. One in five internet users relied on wang ba to get online because it was affordable when buying a home computer wasn’t. China needed internet cafes, the experts pleaded. Inspired, and forgetting where I was, I wrote my headline: ‘CHINA NEEDS INTERNET CAFES’. The little rebellion didn’t get far. Somewhere in the system, my headline disappeared, and so did any criticism of the government. The story hit the presses under the heading: ‘NATION GOES ALL OUT TO ELIMINATE PROBLEMS IN CAFE ADMINISTRATION’.

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I wondered in retrospect whether my headline had drawn too much attention. If it had politely toed the line, maybe the rest might have slipped through the system unnoticed. I had to try harder to appear to be toeing the line. I was still learning the ropes. • Ting Ting had taken me to the national ballet for a special performance dedicated to ‘Celebrating The Contribution Of Foreign Experts’ the day before I was due to attend the opening of an Australian film festival at the invitation of the Australian Embassy, so the week was turning into something of a cultural whirlwind. The embassy’s cultural consul told me he had spent months organising a program of Australian cinema, subtitled in Chinese, to be shown in busy Wangfujing during May Week. He was enthusiastic about the ties between the Australian and Chinese film industries, which had seen Chinese directors favour Sydney companies to create specialeffects in films like Hero and House of Flying Daggers. I was a Chinese film fan and wondered how Chinese audiences would find Two Hands in return. Actors Bryan Brown and Sam Neill had been secured for the gala launch. When I arrived late to the Grand Hyatt, because I’d not yet learnt to allow time for excruciating traffic, the bubbly was flowing and so was the conversation among a frockedup festival crowd. I followed the bewildered gaze of a ponytailed Beijinger in a black suit to the podium at the front of the room. The Australian immigration minister, Amanda Vanstone, was ploughing her way through a long, official speech—in Chinese. She was a braver woman than I.

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The crowd kept talking as the minister continued to slowly read on in a broad Australian monotone. Above the din I heard someone call out my name, and turned to see a correspondent I’d met at an embassy trade dinner making a beeline in my direction. ‘Did you know that Allison has been taken to hospital?’ he asked. I was shocked. She’d sent me a text message that morning. ‘She said she felt crook. Probably had food poisoning,’ I told him. ‘It was more than that. My wife ran into her at the American medical clinic this afternoon. The doctors suspect acute appendicitis and want it taken out immediately.’ The American clinic was extremely expensive, so she had been admitted to the public hospital Peking Union. ‘Where is it?’ I asked. ‘Only a few blocks from here.’ I stepped outside and rang Allison on her mobile. ‘I’m coming over . . . No really, the festival launch is boring. I can’t believe Amanda Vanstone tried to give a speech in . . .’ I yelled down the line with a finger stuck in my ear. As my clam-shell phone clapped shut, I looked over my shoulder to see the minister and a glowering cultural consul emerging from the door behind me. Oops. I wasn’t sure they’d heard me, but just to be safe I waited until they had walked up the stairs and left the building before I grabbed an Australiana show bag on the way out the door. The city was in the middle of a SARS scare, and hospital security was supposed to be tight. I walked straight into Peking Union from the street and past temperature-scanning

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machines that were unattended and switched off. So much for the televised vigilant measures to stop SARS’s spread. Allison had said she was in a bed, but she wasn’t sure where. I wandered the corridors, searching the public wards. The conditions in the dimly lit, crowded rooms made me shudder. ‘Have you seen an Australian girl with yellow hair? She was admitted this afternoon?’ I asked the nurses at each floor station in Chinese. ‘Meiyou—don’t have,’ they said sympathetically. The sight of a laowai dressed for a gala opening and carrying a show bag with a koala mask must have been a strange distraction from their evening rounds. I finally located the private ward on the top floor. It was accessed through a security door. I buzzed and, because I looked foreign, was let in. The girl with yellow hair was here, the nurse confirmed, and directed me to one of the small, private rooms. Judy, Allison’s Scottish boss, was there with her. Allison was fortunate to have health insurance, but had still been required to prove she had the means to pay without it, in cash or plastic, before she was admitted. Chinese hospitals didn’t trust overseas insurance companies. Since government funding had been virtually cut off in the 1980s, hospitals had been left to pay their own way through drug sales and patient fees. Only half of city residents were protected by workplace health programs. The rest paid in cash, and were forced to leave mid-recovery if the cash ran out. If you were poor in China, you went untreated. It was

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a far cry from the days when Mao’s barefoot doctors roamed the countryside. Doctors came and went, undecided on whether they could operate as soon as the American doctor at the clinic had recommended they should. They didn’t hold any stores of Allison’s blood type, and it was getting late and inconvenient. Tipsy on champagne and remembering everything I had ever read about blood transfusions in China and the likelihood of catching AIDS, I volunteered to give Allison some of mine. ‘What blood type are you?’ the nurse asked. ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. She scowled at me, and said it would take too long to test and screen it. At 10.30 p.m. the decision was made to go ahead and operate without blood. It would be an old-fashioned appendectomy, because keyhole surgery was not on offer. Allison was wheeled out. Judy left, after I assured her I would wait in the room until the operation was over. I wasn’t going anywhere until I was sure Allison came back.

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Allison’s fever had broken and all that remained, in the words of the hospital doctor, was for her to break wind. Between his limited English and Allison’s tenuous grasp of Chinese medical terminology, the exact meaning of this vital postsurgical phase was elusive until a visitor translated that the doctor required his young patient to fart before she could be discharged from the ward. And until she farted, she couldn’t eat or drink. It was painfully uncomfortable, and could take days for the gases to build. Allison urged me not to hang around the hospital, and to go to Sichuan for the May Day holiday as I had planned. I was still stressed out by the whole encounter with the Chinese medical system. I had nightmares after having to lift her, unconscious, off the operating table in the middle of the night two days earlier wrapped in a green sheet and as heavy as a corpse. Green was a colour to disguise blood. 102

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She was almost dropped from the wheeled trolley as the slightly-framed male anaesthetist and female nurse strained to heave her up and onto the ward bed. Allison was slim, so the issue was understaffing and not weight. The limp, leaden body was rolled and pushed across the trolley by the pair, and I was told to grab her head. It was as heavy as a bowling ball and I tried not to rip her blonde hair which was clumped with sweat. Allison was starting to come out of the anaesthetic and screamed. She couldn’t see and called out my name, wanting to know that someone familiar and English-speaking was close by. The Chinese nurse was oblivious to her distress. ‘I’m here,’ I replied. Time and place were distorted by the drugs and she pleaded, ‘I don’t want to go’. But it was over. The appendix had been removed. She told me later that when they wheeled her into the operating theatre she saw the surgeons sitting around playing cards and drinking tea. They looked up and laughed. All of a sudden her bravado vanished, and she decided it was a very bad idea to go under the knife in a Chinese public hospital and she wanted out. Seeing the panic on her face when she was wheeled back afterwards had spooked me because Allison was the sort of person who ran triathlons for fun and had travelled solo to Tibet the hard way—BYO oxygen on a bone-rattling bus ride. She had a combination of toughness and selfdeprecating humour that saw her glide through most situations.

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The nurse and anaesthetist left, instructing me to watch the patient’s breathing for the next two hours as she fell into a heavy sleep. I sat in the cold, silent room wrapped in my overcoat and watching intently. What would I do if her breathing stopped? At 3 a.m. I left, propping the koala mask on the night table with a note. I slipped out of the hospital and into a bone-chilling Beijing night, my taxi speeding past street hawkers burning sweet potatoes over glowing coals. When I woke up, a text message sat on my phone with the time stamp of 6 a.m.: ‘Thanks’. Two days later Allison was tired but laughing again. Judy and Astrid were taking turns to visit and the hospital room was full of fruit baskets and flowers and trashy imported magazines. I had only been in China four weeks, but decided I could do with a holiday. • The entire Foreign Expert staff at China Daily was excited about an unusually generous offer of a free trip to Sichuan province. Ting Ting had forwarded the email invitation to me a week earlier. It was a request for help from Sanxingdui, a town on the banks of the Duck River, a few thousand kilometres away in China’s west. The email said Sanxingdui needed foreigners, fast. May ‘Golden Tourism’ Week was a recent central government invention that had stretched Communist Labour Day into a five-day holiday, celebrating the workers’ revolution with a week-long orgy of consumerist shopping

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and touring. The holiday was rapidly approaching, and the town planned an International Mask Festival to draw attention, and tourists, to its new archaeological museum. The deputy mayor wanted foreigners at the opening ceremony and figured the official foreigners’ newspaper in Beijing would know how to find them. All costs would be covered, the town promised, including airfares. ‘Would you like to go?’ Ting Ting had asked. I Googled ‘Sanxingdui + museum’, but the search engine only threw up alien conspiracy websites. Strange relics dating back 4000 years had been discovered by a Duck River farmer. They threw a spanner in the conventional wisdom that Chinese civilisation had first sprung up around the Yellow River, further north. The relics were so Egyptianlike and un-Chinese in appearance they had to be extraterrestrial, or so the conspiracy theory went. The web pages showed golden masks carved with high cheekbones and large globelike eyes. Intriguing and far flung. I hit the email reply button. The Sanxingdui email had actually asked for foreign diplomats from any of the embassies in Beijing. Ting Ting had conducted a quick ring-around. The Greek cultural consul, a handful of dignitaries from the Mexican Embassy, and a Swede and his Bulgarian wife were in. But most embassy staff had already booked their precious public holiday break. China Daily’s Foreign Experts would have to fill the need for laowai faces instead. Ting Ting had never been to Sichuan. Originally from Nanjing, on the east coast, she had scored a job at China Daily that brought her to Beijing directly from university.

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But like many Chinese, she was a foodie, and Sichuan’s famed spicy hotpot and snacks such as mapo doufu—pock-marked grandma’s tofu—placed the province squarely on the mustsee list. She hadn’t heard of Sanxingdui or its museum either, but she calculated it to be about two hours from the provincial capital of Chengdu, which was hotpot central. It was a far better offer than hanging around the China Daily compound for a week with cash-strapped young colleagues watching DVDs. Or battling the holiday crush on long-distance trains with millions on the move to see family. Ting Ting wanted to go, and posted a notice on the foreigners’ floor in the apartment block to drum up recruits. It is a near-universal fact of life that the news knows no vacation—papers are published regardless of public holidays. So if China Daily was going to release us from shifts to travel—by air, no less—it was an offer that couldn’t be refused. Most signed up, leaving a skeleton crew on the roster. On the Friday morning before Labour Day we gathered in the office foyer, which was newly decorated with patriotic slogans and rows of potted red flowers. Style-queen Nikki had outdone herself in a faux designer ensemble of caramel trench coat, linen trousers and matching Gucci wheeled luggage with Gucci sunglasses resting on her streaked blonde head. Chloe was snappily dressed in all black, all fake Prada. I began to wonder if my polar fleece and jeans were a little scruffy for faux diplomatic air travel. I was saved when Nikki noted her approval of my weekend bag, fake red-striped Burberry, picked up at the markets for ten bucks.

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‘I don’t have that,’ she said. Her obsession with collecting handbags had become a running joke in the compound, and at last count there were more than thirty spanning French, Italian, English and American ‘designer’ labels stashed in her apartment. She reasoned that she couldn’t afford to shop at home, so had to do so at every opportunity while here. She was due to fly out in a fortnight, so the problem of how to stuff them all into her luggage was looming. Luckily her feet were too big for Chinese shoes. Ting Ting arrived in a China Daily T-shirt with official slogan ‘Resist . . . SARS’. It was last year’s marketing campaign which had been unexpectedly revived. She apparently had no luggage, just a daypack. I admired the way the Chinese travelled so light. Even Joe, always clad in a black baseball cap and sleeveless sports-jock sweatshirt, had come. I hadn’t seen him for weeks. When he had first arrived in Beijing he’d been fired-up with enthusiasm for the city and the sporting pot of gold promised by the 2008 Olympics. Badminton wasn’t his thing, but he could envisage the flow-on effect from the games for fringe activities like the ice-hockey league and maybe a fledgling horseracing circuit. But Joe had recently stopped whistling the happy Olympic theme tune and begun to avoid group outings. He said he was tired of the way the Chinese were herded and behaved ‘like sheep’. Joe, by contrast, was a ‘lone wolf’. I knew this because I sat next to him as he explained this fact to his latest young Chinese girlfriend in the back of a taxi, bar-hopping

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across Sanlitun one night. I rolled my eyes at the description, but the girl was still struggling with ‘wolf’. ‘Like a dog,’ I suggested. She wanted to talk about daishu, kangaroos, instead when she heard my accent. Alex made it to the foyer as the bus pulled up. This posed a potential hitch in our plans. He was at the tail end of a bout of flu, but was not going to give up the chance of a free holiday. Unfortunately, flu-like symptoms could have serious consequences at the moment. The government had ordered that all Beijingers were to have their temperature scanned as they exited the city, as part of the effort to contain SARS to the capital. Alex was worried. His face showed a pallor more ghostly than his already pale English complexion. The daily grind of thirteenhour shifts, language study and keeping up with the English Premiership League in the wrong time zone wasn’t helping. Inside the airport departure hall, there was no sign of temperature screening. Just stuffed pandas, overpriced Scandinavian ice cream and queues for the life-insurance counter. There was no SARS screening at the gates either. We took off. It was only as the busload of foreigners pulled up to the outskirts of Sanxingdui that afternoon that the battalion of hospital staff in white coats appeared. A welcoming committee for the times. I disembarked with the others and lined up beside the bus. A thermometer was placed gunlike to my forehead, a red beam of light seeking contagion. I passed. Alex passed. The bus continued into town. Looking out the window at the main road I saw the usual jumble of tiled concrete and glass shopfronts plying

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the wares of regional Chinese life: plastic stools and plastic sandals, racks of cheap cotton clothes, thermos flasks for boiled water, wheeled luggage, fake Gucci handbags. Giant artificial palm trees served as lampposts. The Duck River appeared more duck than river. A jostle of white birds navigating the few splashes of water between broad silt islands. Locals quarried stone by hand and fished as water buffalo roamed the river’s flood plain. It was dusk and people had pulled up cane armchairs to drink and spit sunflower seeds in open-air tea-houses along the bank. About five kilometres downstream, we pulled into the hotel grounds. A ‘Chinese-style’ hotel twenty years ago would have been a concrete box with putrid communal latrines. But this was a Ming dream. Interlocking white-walled courtyards wound around miniature lakes and streams. Weeping willows brushed the water and elaborately piled rock features. Green bamboo thickets screened peaked roofs. It could have been a willow-pattern porcelain. It could have stood there for centuries, but it had barely been completed that month. Lost garden arts and architecture were being revived across the country in the pursuit of the tourist dollar. A woman in a prim beige pinafore and court shoes, clutching a fake Prada handbag, appeared beside the bus. Miss Xu, the town’s tourism officer, had been assigned to greet the first foreign guests to stay in Sanxingdui’s only four-star hotel. A recent graduate with fluent English, she looked immaculate as her visitors crumpled in the high humidity.

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She guided us into the foyer to be assigned to rooms. We were doubling up, and some of the boys had already grumbled about not wanting to share with Joe because of his reputation for unexpected sleepovers. I wondered how the Chinese journalists coped with oversexed room-mates. On a previous company skiing trip, Foreign Experts unaccustomed to the privacy intrusion had been held responsible for their room-mates’ nocturnal behaviour. The midnight disappearance of one of the lads working for the paper at the time had led to married-with-children Tom being farcically interrogated by a panicked Small Chen. Adults treated like school campers. In the lobby, Ashley announced that she would be ‘rooming’ with Nikki, no one else, despite any instructions to the contrary issued by the concierge. I was sharing with the Greek cultural consul, a charming woman aged in her fifties. Feeling like extras from the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, we swept along a stone path to our room, past pagodas and a strutting emerald peacock. Inside, modern Asian design was slickly combined with chrome and glass finishes. My attention was stolen, however, by the plumply stuffed pillows that were stacked high on the twin inner-sprung mattresses. A mattress. It had been a month. Whatever else Sanxingdui held in store, I looked forward to sleep. • Dinner presented the first crack in Sanxingdui’s outwardly sparkling new tourism machine. A steady procession of dishes flew out of the kitchen to the large dining tables. Cool dishes of cucumber and

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radish, diced ‘explosion fried’ chicken, a whole baked fish, minced pork, noodles. It was the usual fare served in the manner typical of restaurants across China. Ting Ting was unexcited, having travelled so far in pursuit of Sichuan spice, and Joe produced a Subway sandwich he had carried as supplies from Beijing. The rest of us dug in, pushing the dishes around the lazy susan and picking them off piece by piece into small bowls. As her guests ate, Miss Xu frowned. Sitting beside her, I noticed her frown had become particularly focused on me. ‘You would like a fork,’ she said finally. I was mortified. Self-conscious, I let my chopsticks slip sideways. A chunk of crispy-skinned fish plummeted to the tablecloth, depositing an oily orange mark. ‘Westerners eat with forks,’ Miss Xu declared. It sounded like a mantra studied carefully and repeated at business school. She summoned a waitress to search out the exotic implement. My face burnt red. I was from Sydney, where yum cha was a weekend tradition. I wasn’t going to use a fork in China, at least not in public. ‘I can use kuaizi,’ I gently protested, using the Chinese word for chopsticks, which ironically means ‘bamboo for eating rapidly’. Around the table, foreigners seated elbow to elbow were chasing food around rice bowls, clumsily splicing the air with plastic sticks. No one was going hungry. But Miss Xu looked uneasy. The foreigners weren’t sticking to the textbook. They should be using forks. And they should be pleased to have forks offered.

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I tried to reassure her: ‘We live in Beijing.’ I guiltily remembered snickering at the ineptitude of diners in Beijing’s Pizza Hut. It had been late on a weeknight after grocery shopping at the French-owned supermarket Carrefour, and I’d been tempted by a chunky crust and airconditioning on my way home with a stash of foreign muesli and sunscreen. Inside, the salad bar, pizza menu and place settings could have been anywhere in the world. But the couple at the table next to me stared at the knife and fork put in front of them. Finally, the woman awkwardly grasped hold of the metal with two hands and tried to draw the cutlery together as she stabbed into the melted cheese. But it was chopstick motion and doomed to failure. She tried again, determined that Western cutlery was intrinsic to this exorbitant American dining experience. Her partner looked on. I picked up my slice of ham and pineapple with my hands. I knew I had an ungainly chopstick style and often crossed sticks as I ate. Being left-handed, I gave up worrying about strict table orthodoxy years ago. But it was obvious my chopstick technique, although effective, was as ridiculous to Miss Xu as the Pizza Hut woman had seemed to me. So this was my cutlery karma. I tried to prove a point and boldly reached for the plate of gongbao jiding to pluck a peanut from among the chicken cubes. It was the ultimate challenge. Stay, stay, stay, I willed the peanut. Lift off . . . Touch down! The tray of forks that had appeared by my side sat unused. The cultural skirmishing moved on to beverages.

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‘We need water,’ said Nikki. It was sweltering, and there was no bottled water in sight. Tap water was off limits everywhere in China, and particularly in a town on the banks of a low-lying river. This was rarely a problem as small shops and hawkers could be relied on to supply bottles of commercial spring water at any time of day, in most places. Except for a four-star hotel on the outskirts of Sanxingdui. Boiling hot water was poured steaming into our glasses instead. Red wine, meanwhile, was being meted out one nip at a time by waitresses immune to the diners cajoling them to fill the large, bulbous glasses to the top. The ubiquitous Chinese white spirit, baijiu, is strong stuff and drunk in shots as a toast throughout the meal until diners fall under the table. To the waitresses, these glasses were clearly far too large for alcohol, even if it was red. Nikki, becoming impatient, tried for juice instead. ‘Not possible,’ said Miss Xu. The juice cartons were kept locked in the refrigerator. The only key was held by the dining manager, and he was off duty. Ting Ting was twitchy for hotpot. The rest of us needed a beer. It was time to explore Sanxingdui. We headed to the lobby and Ting Ting asked the front desk to phone for taxis. Instead, the desk staff called the hotel manager. ‘Sanxingdui has no taxis,’ he told her. Ting Ting’s face pulled into one of her tight, icy smiles. This statement would have been hard to believe anywhere in China, where private car ownership had only recently taken off and remained beyond the incomes of most rural workers. But she was not going to be beaten by a simple

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organisational challenge. Ting Ting asked where could she hire a bus or private drivers for her group. The hotel manager left to find Miss Xu. Forty-five minutes later, there was still no bus and no drivers, just restless foreigners loitering in a large group outside the lobby. Tipped off to the growing revolt on his town’s doorstep by an emergency phone call, the deputy mayor of Sanxingdui arrived. Ting Ting’s expression darkened as she was told that there were no buses available for hire in Sanxingdui. The deputy mayor requested that all foreign guests confine themselves to the hotel for the duration of their stay. To press his point, he mentioned the presence of guards now stationed at the front gate. The hotel had become a fourstar foreigners’ prison. Ting Ting gave up. She wasn’t going to be responsible for this. Her foreigners could do their worst. Joe made the first break for freedom, marching off in the direction of the road with Gus in tow. They decided they would walk the five kilometres into town if they had to. The guards at the main gate called out for them to stop or be stopped. A very calm Joe, at twice the height and girth of any of the guards, invited them to try it. It was clearly a physical mismatch. The confused guards didn’t call the bluff, and Joe and Gus kept walking. When they reached the road, the town’s phantom taxi fleet stood waiting. Dougal, a card-carrying member of the Scottish Communist Party, set off after them with his heavily pregnant wife Jiang Jiang.

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‘I am an adult and my wife is Chinese. There is no chance of us getting lost,’ he told the guards. But he soon gave up trying to reason or rationalise why he should be let out. ‘This is surreal,’ he muttered, and pushed through. A mass walkout, including embassy staff, ensued. The deputy mayor dispatched police into town. They kept their distance and watched as foreigners simply enjoyed a beer with friendly locals. Later that night, Ting Ting joined Chloe, Nikki and I sitting in the hotel’s lakeside pagoda. Ting Ting was angry at being set up by her Sichuan hosts, and her mood was black. ‘They were lying to me,’ she mused. I was surprised at how badly she was taking it. The power wielded so openly by the deputy mayor was intriguing. I had constantly heard of China’s local government fiefdoms, which could stubbornly wreck Beijing’s policy reform in the pursuit of self-interest and preserving small-town hierarchies. To the outsider, China seemed monolithic. But the ancient proverb, ‘The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away’, continued to hold true, at least out here. While Beijing and Shanghai had given the appearance of relaxing many of the old restrictions on foreigners in the trade-off for tourism, in Sanxingdui nothing had changed. The suspicion of outsiders remained an undercurrent in Beijing, still felt in the requirement to register living arrangements, for example. With unerring accuracy, Beijing’s security police would turn up on the doorstep of any foreigner who had been lulled into a false sense of anonymity

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by renting a private apartment, to haul them down to the police station to comply. In Sanxingdui, however, the suspicion was overt. Ting Ting’s primary role at China Daily was to keep the foreign help in line. If a Foreign Expert had not arrived at work by midmorning, she was on the doorstep finding out why. She dragged the sick into the office and had won the nickname Sergeant Ting. But right now someone else was pulling the strings, and Ting Ting was cast uncomfortably in the role of outsider. She had been outsmarted. It was beginning to dawn on all of us that the too-good-to-turndown invitation had delivered a captive audience. • Saturday was May 1, Labour Day, and it was pouring with rain. I arrived early to breakfast to find cartons of juice on the table. The kitchen staff had tracked down the refrigerator key, it seemed. Hot green tea or boiled rice milk was the usual morning beverage at the hotel, so there was no chance of a hangover fix of coffee. But Nikki was delighted with the juice, and generously shared out the precious orange liquid into six glasses for our table. Her excitement vanished with the first gulp. The juice was carrot, thick and syrupy. And it was warm. The locked refrigerator had kept thieves out, but it was not plugged in. Miss Xu, wearing the same beige pinafore and shoes as the day before, entered the dining room with a SWAT team of foreign tourist handlers to herd us onto a waiting bus. Where we sat and waited. The rain began to fall harder. More foreigners from Shanghai had joined the group, including a multilingual bunch of Foreign Experts from the

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Xinhua wire service. Xinhua consisted largely of government announcements, translated into seven languages around the clock, and China Daily was obliged to run its stories. Some English teachers had also been rustled up for the day from a Chengdu university. I sat next to a middle-aged British professor who had been teaching in Sichuan for five years. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked, casting an eye around the bus at the mix of ages and nationalities. ‘We are mostly from Beijing. China Daily,’ I said. ‘Rubbish. My students can’t bear to read it. Propaganda. It’s all lies. They don’t believe anything they read in that newspaper.’ I smiled sympathetically. Miss Xu and her minders finally boarded the bus again with armfuls of umbrellas, red T-shirts emblazoned with the logo of a Sichuan brewer, and masks. Sanxingdui’s festival would not be put off. Wearing the masks, we were told, was compulsory. I realised that I was not here to simply watch an international mask festival, I was part of the ‘international’ component. We were the shipped-in exotic worldly flavour. A party pack of cardboard butterfly and rubber horror masks was passed around. The men got the werewolf and Frankenstein hoods. The bus pulled up outside the town square and we were booted off into the parade marshalling area in the rain. Joe melted away into a sea of umbrellas. The rest of us marched. It was very cold and very wet, but the thousands of locals lining the streets found our appearance very entertaining. Shopgirls stood in a row of purple dresses and

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black cloth shoes, clapping us on. Children propped on bicycle handlebars, wheeled in from nearby villages, stared at the strange foreign heads, with or without masks. I felt like someone’s prize cow being paraded down the main street for the rural show. We were at the rear of the procession, behind a long scaled dragon which reared up and down and swirled along the street, carried on sticks by acrobatic young men in matching gold headscarves and pyjamas. The beat of the dragon drum was urgent and relentlessly demanded performance as the kilometres slipped by. The dragon handlers continued to swap places, bringing in reserves from the sideline to stave off exhaustion. As the parade dissolved, I finally caught sight of the thousands of costumed locals that had been marching ahead of us in sodden gladiator outfits and papier-mâché helmets. They were climbing onto open-deck trucks. We were being bussed to the next stop on the day’s program, the relic museum. The parade had only been Sanxingdui’s warm-up act. Outside the museum, thousands of families had turned out in their holiday best to wait for the festival opening ceremony. A brass band had kept the crowd entertained, but at the last minute the deputy mayor made a decision to relocate the entire afternoon’s program of dancing and speeches to a small hall which could only seat a few hundred, at best. Inside the hall, rows of official places marked out by bottles of spring water, floral arrangements and name cards took up three-quarters of the seats. The band stood playing

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in the aisles and the foreign guests scrambled up the back. The public waited outside in the rain. Speeches were made under banners and white doves released into the air. The deputy mayor was pleased. Next on the program: an evening ‘musical extravaganza’. • Hundreds of police lined the cyclone fencing that had been erected around a makeshift concert zone in paddocks on the outskirts of town. They lined the dirt road carrying limousines and ticket holders paying four hundred and eighty yuan, or a hundred dollars, a head. Boards had been put up to shield the road from shanty dwellings and the growing mass of curious, ticketless onlookers. At that price, most of the audience had been drawn from outside Sanxingdui, probably Chengdu and on city salaries. Security was even tighter at the two narrow gates leading into the actual venue. I thought about whether or not this was heavy-handed; I didn’t know what Chinese concert audiences were like. Outdoor music festivals in Australia often came with bouncers in yellow T-shirts forming a human barrier between stage and stage-diving, boot-clad moshers. Metal detectors and bag inspections were not uncommon in the search for illicit booze and drugs. But here, it was just about crowd control, the perpetual government fear of public gatherings and the potential of sheer numbers. Beyond the entry gauntlet was a sea of white plastic chairs and churning mud. The stage towered above the rapidly filling seats in a brilliant haze of smoke and silver light. I plunged into a surging crush of bodies.

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Crowd survival technique is mandatory for living in China. Small steps forward, with elbows defensive and intent resolute, is often the only approach in a population of 1.3 billion. But this night was something else again. I felt at imminent risk of being swept off my feet and being pulled down into the mud by a human undertow. Excited families, middle-aged parents and teenagers alike were rushing in conflicting directions in the dark to find their seats. The makeshift aisles were not wide enough. The weather was holding, but I panicked at the thought of what might happen if the heavens opened. Stampedes in China had been lethal, and there was no easy way over that fence. The Taiwanese girl-band SHE bounded onto the stage. They were Mando-pop princesses. Jay Chou, another Taiwanese crooner on the bill, was the Chinese-speaking world’s pop prince. I reached my seat as the crowd jumped to its feet, pressing forward for a better view. We were far, far from the stage and SHE were tiny microphone-waving doll figures. My feet sank into a cold, muddy pool. There was another roar as a sole female singer took to the stage. I could see that she was older, quite old. ‘Who is that?’ I asked Ting Ting. ‘China’s folk sweetheart.’ The sound system barely delivered her high-pitched trill over the appreciative echo of the crowd singing along. Alex knew the name Jay Chou and was keen to see what the hysteria was about. Jay Chou was the front-page pin-up boy of China Daily’s teen paper. Alex was something of a Jay Chou encyclopedia now, after rewriting story after

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glowing story for the paper. He informed me that Jay Chou loved his parents with a filial piety that was a good Chinese girl’s dream. Mando-pop was more saccharine crooning and tousled hair perfection than rebellion. Mind you, the mainland government didn’t give bands much room to move in terms of a rock’n’roll image. Britney Spears was given permission to tour China only on the condition that officials from the Ministry of Culture were allowed to vet her outfits first. A popular Chinese heavy rock band had recently hit the television news, with a press conference stage-managed by the authorities, to announce their split due to one band member being caught in possession of drugs and his imminent jailing. It was a public example. Alex was prepared to endure the cold with Ting Ting while they waited for the pop prince to take the stage. Nikki was not. To Canadian ears that spent much of their time plugged into an iPod, Chinese folk music over a crackling sound system was incomprehensible caterwaul. A text message had arrived from Gus, sitting with the deputy mayor in a row much closer to the stage. He had politely sat through the first few acts but was now planning to leave. I could see that the Xinhua group and embassy staff were already slowly squeezing their way along the row of plastic chairs in front of us. I reasoned that if the embassy staff were leaving, I could too. Retreat plans were relayed by text message. Miss Xu nodded her agreement—if the foreigners were finding it too crowded they should go, although they might have difficulty getting anywhere. She was going to stay and enjoy the show.

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We regrouped in a paddock playing car park to hundreds of minibuses and empty taxis. Drivers sat around waiting, smoking and drinking baijiu. Limos slowly crawled past to the backstage area. Joe had quietly vanished long ago, but there was no sign of Gus either. Then a text message blipped onto Nikki’s phone: ‘A problem’. It was from Gus. Another one a few minutes later: ‘Stuck’. Nikki informed him that even the embassy staff had managed to get out—the crowd was not that impenetrable. The reply: ‘Deputy mayor’. Anticipating that the honest approach was unlikely to be effective, Gus had politely offered the face-saving excuse of needing to duck out to the toilet. Although it was usually a foreign chick peculiarity to travel to the bathroom in pairs, Steve, the hulking West Australian Foreign Expert sitting with him, needed to go too. But the deputy mayor had said he would accompany them. He had then waited outside the stinking portaloo and escorted them back to their seats, firmly clasping their elbows. It had become a battle of wills. ‘We wait’, Nikki texted in support. Gus and Steve were released half an hour later, after a verbal confrontation both of them would in all other circumstances have sought to avoid. Gus had been dubbed ‘Che Guevara’ by one of the old American ex-servicemen who, strangely, could be found in the China Daily compound in various capacities. The comment referred to Gus’s Argentinean birth, and not to any revolutionary tendencies. Gus was the most culturally sensitive and agreeable Foreign Expert on staff.

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But it is surprising how hard and stubbornly you can find yourself fighting to exercise free will in China. As a Westerner, you have until this point cruised through life taking the small things—such as the freedom to party, or to leave a bad pop concert—for granted. None of the bus or taxi drivers could be persuaded to take us into town that night—there were bigger fares waiting at the end of the show. Instead, we walked. Gus decided our unused tickets should be distributed to the dishevelled locals hovering around the car park in hope of a glimpse of the excitement. They successfully ran the ticket-check gauntlet and gave us a triumphant air punch from the other side of the cyclone fence. Bring on Jay Chou. Small victories are sweet. • The line of bicycle rickshaws pulled to a halt under the neon glow of metal palm trees. A thumping bass rumbled out from the two-storey building before us. Our drivers jumped out and caucused. As the designated Chinese-speaking navigators, Gus and I had been so preoccupied with the discovery that the Sichuan dialect bore little resemblance to our Beijing Chinese as we turned left and right in search of the di-si-ke, that we had neglected to negotiate a price. Our drivers would now do it for us, after the fact. They were a cartel that could name their price. We were directionless fat wallets. They had picked us up on the river bank and created a snaking column of rickshaws pulling slowly across town. The colonial-style procession had turned

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heads and prompted calls of ‘Where are they from?’ in the street. Our drivers had enjoyed the joke. Would extortion be a bigger laugh? We could hardly complain to the authorities, given we were on such good terms with the deputy mayor. We were practically on the run. Instead, the drivers agreed among themselves that ten yuan a head would be fair. It was more than fair, it was cheap. I was reminded that this was China and not touristweary Asia, where slick rickshaw rip-offs were notorious in parts. By contrast, the communist price-fixers’ only concern had been pay equity. The narrow doorway to the nightclub opened to two flights of stairs. The carpet was putrid, and the smell of urine emanating from the toilet mixed with cigarette smoke was choking. But it was an international kind of seediness that was immediately familiar. On the top floor was a cavernous, smoky room. A timber bar curved around one wall. Booth seating took up the other side of a wide dance floor. On stage, fat headphones wrapped around his skull, was the DJ. Two girls in leopard-print minis swung around two poles in the middle of the dance floor. They reappeared at tenminute intervals in new outfits with choreographed kicks. It could have been sleazy, but I wasn’t sure. Pole dancing had taken off in Sydney the previous summer. We sat down at a table at the far end of the room. A waiter delivered bottles of beer in a half-cut wooden barrel that could have been filled with ice to keep them cool but wasn’t.

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Joe was already there. While we had hiked down dirt roads into town, he had befriended a policeman who drove him back to the hotel, waited for Joe to change his clothes, and then drove him into town again, right to the front door of the di-si-ke. There were two women at his table. ‘Joe always finds women,’ said Ting Ting, who had arrived by taxi with Alex. She was neither critical nor amused. It was just an observation. She picked up a warm beer. Around us, young locals were laughing and drinking and chain-smoking. Most of the guys were stripped to the waist. They backslapped, high-fived and wrapped their arms around one another. This was Sichuan, hot and steamy. I checked out the boys at the table in front of us. They had well-built arms and torsos. I wondered what they did during the day. Was there a gym in downtown Sanxingdui, or was it a physique sculpted by hard labour? In the dim light of a nightclub and without the social marker of a shirt (collared? sweat-stained? imported? fake?) it didn’t matter. Bare flesh is a great equaliser. I noticed that on the dance floor boys danced chest to chest and shoulder to shoulder. The girls were hand in hand. There were no mixed couples. This didn’t necessarily mean anything. It was not uncommon in China to see young men walking along holding hands, or with arms draped across friends’ shoulders. Communal upbringings, which could often mean sharing school dormitories and later factory dorms, created a different sense of personal space. When the dance floor boys sat down, their girlfriends stretched arms around their shoulders possessively.

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Ting Ting’s face was burning in the sultry air and she tried to roll up the sleeves of her long red shirt. The music was too loud to hear what she was saying. Nikki was at the bar talking to the Russian Xinhua guy. Gus was enraptured by Xinhua’s Spanish translators and had declared one a long-lost brother, spilling out words in a mother tongue he had forsaken for English in a Chinese-speaking office. Alex was talking soccer and the DJ was spinning the Black Eyed Peas. I had to remind myself I was not in Beijing but on the banks of the Duck River, where the local government had in the past forty-eight hours attempted to slap down a curfew to lock us in at night and had sent out police surveillance. The music stopped abruptly. Smoke filled the room. In a flurry of shocking pink frills, glittering makeup and towering heels, a drag queen swept onto the dance floor. The crowd roared in appreciation, and a cabaret act of Priscilla proportions took over the stage. Egged on by friends, the local boys jumped at the chance for a personal lap dance. In a country where homosexuality had only recently been taken off the official list of classified mental disorders, and stamping out moral pollution was a continuous government campaign, we had stumbled into Sanxingdui’s dirty little secret. And it was fabulous. • By the time I returned to Beijing, Allison was out of hospital and proudly flashing a long scar. Back in the office after the May Week break, An Ling skipped over to my desk and beckoned for me to come to

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her computer to look at her holiday snapshots. She had caught the train to Dalian, a northern port town on the Yellow Sea, with two girlfriends. The first photo was of the three of them in China Daily’s Dalian office. They had arranged to stay there to keep costs down. The next image was the three of them at the Dalian trade expo, posing in front of an automotive display. In the next shot, the three musketeers had hired a car and driven down the coast to look at the beach. ‘We didn’t go swimming, just took photos,’ said An Ling. ‘I couldn’t afford to go on a holiday,’ snapped a subeditor sitting nearby. She was clearly annoyed by our holiday chatter. ‘What did you do?’ I asked her. ‘I shopped for some simple decorations for my room. They were inexpensive,’ she said grumpily. She had emphasised the word ‘shop’, as if it were her patriotic duty to do so during Golden Week. Yet somehow she’d still found herself left out of the fun of the holiday season.

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8. Sky Sky

Sky was born in Chairman Mao’s village in Hunan province. If you knew this, and looked for it, you could see she had the same broad round face and big dark eyes. While she was fond of repeating the Mao connection to anyone she met, Sky refused to divulge her age, especially around men. I guessed she was a dog under the Chinese zodiac. She smiled. From there it was easy to work out. Animal signs came up every twelve years. It was a wild and lucky stab on my part, but to her it meant something more. It helped cement our friendship. Raised by her grandparents in a Beijing hutong longsince bulldozed, Sky now spent her days riding a bicycle around the university district, recruiting students for a private English-language school. I met her in the street outside China Daily. She had a stack of paper posters on her bike’s parcel rack, scrawled with hand-drawn characters that she planned to pin on university noticeboards. She had stopped to talk with a friend from the school and China 128

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Daily’s New Zealand Foreign Expert. Aged in his fifties, he was being persuaded to come along and talk to a class and was feeling swamped by these two young Chinese women. He beckoned for me to come over and help translate. Sky and her friend, Yu Jia, had a better idea: why didn’t we all go shopping? We fixed a date for the coming Sunday. The temperature had plummeted to sixteen degrees celsius by the weekend but the drizzle didn’t dampen our big day out. We hit Wangfujing with Yu Jia’s eighteen-month-old daughter, Cixi, in tow. They had chosen Wangfujing because they thought it was where a Western girl would want to go. But Sky quickly revealed she wasn’t at all interested in the mall’s glossy fashion boutiques and big department stores. ‘People come here to look, not buy. It’s too expensive!’ she laughed. ‘Beijing girls buy better clothes at Xidan.’ Xidan was a chaotic fashion market further out. Sky and Yu Jia said they were more interested in books than clothes anyway. We headed to the Foreign Languages Bookstore, one of the few places in the city to buy Englishlanguage novels. According to the brass plaque on the door, the store was a designated ‘Copyright Protection Sales Demonstration Unit’. It meant the books were genuine. Sky boasted she had already read the Harry Potter series we discovered on the shelves. But when she turned over one of the books and saw the eighty yuan price tag, she dismissed it. ‘I wouldn’t pay this much,’ she said, shocked. I figured the black market for books must be as extensive as that for DVDs.

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Sky said she had taught herself English by reading. She had learnt without the benefit of a teacher or the classes she was now promoting for a small wage. Remembering the struggle I’d had with my first Chinese lessons, I was impressed by her self-discipline. Sky fascinated me. She was sharp and feisty, with a big laugh and a wide, wide smile. Her own opinion of herself was lower. She said women from Hunan were renowned beauties with complexions softened by the province’s dewy, humid air. But she complained that her head was too large, her skin too dark and her hair, which was cut into a loose bob, too unruly. ‘When I was a child, I looked like a fuzzy brown bear!’ she said, eyes flashing wildly. I thought this was hilarious. We talked nonstop all day in a jumble of English and Chinese. She lived with her two pet dogs, the ubiquitous white and yappy kind. ‘They are my brother and sister,’ she said, with only a hint of longing. Sky told me that her parents had been busy working when she was a child and that was why she had been sent to live in Beijing with her grandparents. Her grandparents had since passed on, and her parents had joined her in Beijing, where they lived together in an old Soviet-style apartment. But her mother was often in hospital and her father frequently away on business. Sky had her furry siblings for company. We ate lunch at Quanjude, Beijing’s oldest Peking duck restaurant chain, and then moved on to knick-knack stores. Qianmen was an ancient commercial and red-light district that had sprung up outside the front gate of the Forbidden

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City in imperial times. The landmark theatres, silk stores and herbal medicine counters remained, although the brothels were swept out by the people’s liberation. Sky said she had grown up nearby. Although her grandparent’s hutong had been knocked down, others survived, and wandering through the area it was easy to imagine the sounds and smells of imperial China. Small alleys that defeated cars still allowed children to play in packs and jump in puddles after the rain. Rose bushes found a way to spring out of tiny pockets of garden. Among the sometimes decrepit and putrid homes were trading precincts: a row of slaughterhouses with crates of chickens stacked outside and a butcher’s shop next door; the tanks of fish shops; vegetable stores; and telephone stalls where people sat at tables on the street to dial another province or overseas. You could picture the bustle outside the emperor’s walls, where the merchants, whores and beggars had swept through the dirt lanes in silk robes or black cotton rags, dodging stinking mud puddles. We browsed through calligraphy supplies in Liulichang Street. ‘My father likes to paint,’ Sky said. ‘He’s quite good. When I was young, I went with him to meet a famous calligrapher. He gave me a name chop.’ In the suburb where I grew up, the equivalent boast of Sky’s famous name chop would have been the signature of a sporting hero. I loved the way Beijingers were so passionate about their art, books and music. The day before, I had stumbled across a book fair in Ditan Park and spent hours elbowing my way through the crush at stalls positioned among fragrant

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peony beds. People pored over novels, historical texts, largeformat art books and brushes. The crowd had paid a cover charge of three yuan to enter the fair, and some had brought shopping trolleys to stack with heavy tomes to take back to their apartments. I had found a copy of the children’s classic, Lei Feng is a Model Soldier. Red-scarfed school kids across China had been taught to ‘Learn From Lei Feng’, who was dutiful and patriotic. Maybe I should too. I paid three yuan and bought the book. I learnt that, like Mao and Sky, Lei Feng was also born in Hunan. Only his father was killed by the Japanese and his mother committed suicide. The Party became his family, inspiring Lei Feng to do good deeds for others and to always find time to study. Although he died tragically young in the Maoist heyday of the 1960s, the Lei Feng spirit lived on in the modern Chinese school curriculum, and his new website. As we walked around the Liulichang art store, Sky asked me to call out the English names of the items she picked up, and imitated my pronunciation. ‘Brush, ink, stone.’ She returned the favour. ‘Maobi, mo, shi.’ A glass perfume bottle carved with a blue fish caught my eye. Sky whispered for me to stand back. ‘They will rip you off. You can’t help it. You are a foreigner, and will always look like one,’ she said. I considered myself to be a tough bargainer, and told Sky I’d recently scored an ‘Armani’ leather bag at Xiushui, Beijing’s favourite open-air ‘silk alley’, for the dirt-cheap price of a hundred and fifty yuan.

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Haggling over handbags under the poplar trees was both blood sport and a living for the gregarious stall owners at Xiushui, although within a year this market, too, would be demolished. I had pulled the ‘walk away and feign disinterest’ trick, the ‘talk Putonghua (common speech) and feign poor language student’ ploy, and the ‘I can get it for half that in my local neighbourhood’ tactic. The bag had tumbled down from three hundred and fifty yuan. But Sky laughed at my tale and said she wouldn’t pay more than fifty yuan for any bag. The sticker on the perfume bottle said a hundred and eighty yuan. Sky secured it for twenty-five, after a steady chorus of ‘pengyou, pengyou—friend, friend’. I realised I was a complete amateur. Sky said the downside to bargaining with shopkeepers was that you had to buy if they gave you a really good deal. There was no window-shopping when both sides expended that much energy. To simply change your mind would be too embarrassing. Yu Jia’s arms were flagging under the weight of an overtired Cixi, so we headed towards Tiananmen to find a taxi. As we passed a group of Japanese tourists with cameras, Sky turned to me and loudly volunteered that she didn’t like the Japanese. ‘They make war and trouble. Japanese people are bad,’ she said. It seemed out of character. ‘Have you met any Japanese?’ ‘No.’ She hated the Japanese because that was what she had been taught at school, and that was all the media had ever told her.

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It seemed strange at the time, but I remembered Sky’s words a year later as I watched TV images of thousands of young Chinese pouring onto the streets in Beijing and Shanghai to protest against Japanese companies, throwing rocks and waving anti-Japan placards. The riots had been sparked by an incident over a Japanese school textbook that was trying to erase wartime history. The street scenes were not a spontaneous outpouring of emotion. Such things weren’t allowed to happen in Beijing. It was, instead, a long-cultivated and officially-sanctioned hatred. • Sky reckoned Xidan was the place to shop, and when we went there the next weekend I saw immediately what she meant. West of Tiananmen on the subway loop, it was buzzing, and barely anyone over thirty was in sight. The Xidan clothes market encompassed a maze of crumbling hutongs and high-rise towers. To discover its funky heart, you just followed the punk hairdos through the doors of the staid Xidan Department Store and up two flights of escalators. When the music started thumping you knew you had arrived. First came the bright and shiny things: a treasure chest of earrings, belts, sunnies, plush toys and mobile-phone trinkets. They were and hung on long rows of board sold by a clamour of young vendors. It was loud and lively. Friends crowded into photo booths, manicurists produced glittering rainbow hands, and boys with hairdryers and scissors made peacock hairdos—on boys. The next floor was clothes. Sky liked to dress simply, an embroidered blouse and denim skirt, or jeans and a T-shirt. I asked a pixie girl with a pierced lip in combat

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boots and a fluoro yellow mini where was the best place in Beijing to shop. ‘Here,’ she said, confirming Sky’s verdict. ‘Because it is so beautiful.’ As I wandered the corridors, I saw that it was beautiful. Every stall had been transformed, DIY, into its own little world. Floors had been replaced with foam and covered with a metal mesh so that your feet sank when you walked on it, or hubcaps loaded with springs so you bounced. Other stalls were lined with clear glass bricks embedded with quirky objects, becoming shrines to plastic anime heroes and stuffed bears. There were war zones, graffiti walls and baroque beauty parlours. The individuality was also reflected on the clothing racks. Japanese, Korean, Chinese, French, American and British garments were jumbled together, and in a kind of brand anarchy it was the colour or the style of an item that made it stand out. Sizes were potluck, and you couldn’t shop for labels. Stallholders prided themselves on their ability to pull together disparate pieces and make an outfit, and some only sold clothes this way. It was the full set, displayed on a hanger as one complete look, take it or leave it. Photos of rock chicks, TV starlets and other famous customers were plastered around the stall to give testament to the cool of the stylist. Considering that almost all the clothes in the world came from one place—Made in China—it was interesting that hip Beijingers had a look that was so different. They were braver, more daring, more colourful. Fishnet kneehigh socks, platform shoes, fluoro. It was something like 1980s Japanese deconstruction crossed with a punk revival,

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except punk didn’t happen here the first time around, so there was nothing to revive. Girlfriends hunted in packs or browsed the stalls holding hands with their man. ‘Chinese boys like to shop and make themselves nice,’ said Sky. ‘Australian boys hate it,’ I told her. Sky had to head back, but I stayed on, caught up in Xidan’s colour and movement. Remembering the reaction to Ralph’s tattoos at China Daily, and having read about the historical association of tattoos with criminality in China, I was surprised to see tattoo parlours flourishing at Xidan. And it was girls, not bikers, that were being indelibly inked. The act was performed with gritted teeth behind a curtain in tiny two-by-one-metre stalls, amid the extreme hair salons and trinket booths. A boy in a baggy white basketball outfit reminiscent of China’s NBA hero Yao Ming bowled up to me waving a photo of a leering, wild woman flashing a tongue piercing. She was spilling out of a black leather bustier and had a forearm crawling with tatts. ‘This is what you need,’ he said in Chinese. ‘Do you have one?’ I challenged him. He showed me his calf, the skin still smarting red along the black ink line of a small dragon. ‘New job?’ ‘Come and have a look.’ ‘Only a look.’ I was curious. Tatt touts were everywhere, waving catalogues and beckoning young girls to try it. The tout’s name was Long, or Dragon, and he ushered me across the

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road to yet another youth shopping tower. Young World was ten storeys of retail, food and a karaoke TV lounge. Each floor bore a bizarre English name, from ‘All the Best’ on ground level, ‘So Cool Zone’ on first, then ‘Glaring Show’ and all the way up to ‘Conquer the World’. Long said the centre had just opened and was a pale imitator of the original across the road. It was a real estate developer’s contrivance and punks were thin on the ground. We caught the lift to the eighth floor where I found myself in a corridor of clinics that were all starched white and ward-like beds. Where were the tattooists? Long showed me to a waiting room as I reminded him I was only here to look. I was handed a photo album of this particular clinic’s work. I flipped past the ‘Westernstyle double fold eyelids using special no surgery pain Korean technique’, chemical skin abrasions, eyelash extensions and boob jobs. Finally, I found the tattoos. A white-uniformed woman sat down next to me and asked what I would like done. ‘Just looking,’ I said, more insistently. She showed me the red flames licking across her shoulderblade beneath the stiff white dress. I told her it was very pretty, but not for me because I didn’t like pain. Undeterred, she picked up the book and suggested an anklet of flowers. ‘Flowers are the most popular choice for girls. You can have any colour you want.’ ‘I do like the flowers, but my parents don’t like tattoos,’ I told her. I was more put off by the thought of the flowers growing into faded weeds on saggy old flesh in the future,

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but hoped the parent trick would be a more acceptable Chinese reason to wimp out. ‘But I think they will like it. Mine did,’ she said. Long laughed. Parents not liking it was part of the point. ‘How about tongue piercing?’ I asked, trying to change the topic. Fortunately, they didn’t do it. Long offered to escort me back down and across the road again, so I wouldn’t get lost. Unfortunately, in a lift crowded with white-uniformed women, one helpfully volunteered that her clinic did piercings. We followed her and flipped through more books. Tongue piercing, with a genuine silver stud, would cost a hundred yuan and I wouldn’t have to worry about my mother because everyone in Beijing was doing it, she said. I looked at Long. It was a look that pleaded, ‘Escape?’ ‘I think you should ring your mother and ask her,’ he said. ‘If it’s OK, come back tomorrow. If not, still come back tomorrow. We can go clothes shopping.’ Beijing boys were so metrosexual. I headed back to the subway, passing an outdoor kiosk where exhausted shoppers sipped coconut juice from whole coconuts, plastic bags piled on chairs beside them. They lifted their heads in shocked unison as a barefoot migrant who had been circling, watching, let out a huge screech. The boy started smashing discarded coconut shells that he had fished out of the kiosk’s garbage bin onto the pavement. He looked barely twenty, and his hair was tufted with grime, not product. His black trousers and striped apron were filthy. He looked Tibetan, but I didn’t know enough

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about China’s fifty-six ethnic minority groups to tell for sure. He looked anguished. There were so many migrants in the city now, and the gap between their lives and the middle class they saw flashing the cash in the malls and markets was huge and crushing. • Some time later I met a true Beijing tattoo artist. Dong Dong was not a beautician, didn’t have touts, and didn’t let his clients make spur-of-the-moment decisions. Most were young men making a big commitment. Dong Dong worked up his designs with sketches first, and then with watercolours on paper. He was inspired by dragons, the monsters of Tibetan Buddhist tales, lotus flowers and fish. He worked large, using the body as a canvas, and his tattoos took between three and five sittings to complete. On the day I found his studio, a new tattoo convert sat half-naked outside, waiting with his friend for a black and grey dragon that stretched across a full shoulder and down the front of his torso to dry. The dragon’s head was small and intricate but its body curled in large, menacing arcs. ‘Do many people get these?’ I asked, admiring the scales and shading as Dong Dong inspected his work. ‘Not many,’ he replied. The dragon boy was in his twenties and said his new body art was around the cost of a mobile phone. Dong Dong invited me into the studio to look at more elaborate blueprints that hung like paintings around the walls. He said he had studied calligraphy and painting before taking up tattooing three years ago.

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A university student was flipping through Dong Dong’s sketches with his girlfriend. He picked my accent and asked me to sit down with them. He had come for the fourth instalment of a large dragon on his chest. He was born in Australia, although he had lived in Beijing for seven years. ‘Tattoos have just exploded here,’ he said. In places like Xidan, they were cheap, small and the quality wasn’t high. He said a friend had to sit six painful times to get a tiny decorative swirl fixed after a botched job. Dong Dong, by contrast, enjoyed a high reputation. ‘It’s important to get it right because it’s going to be there for the rest of my life. I’m half Chinese and this is a symbol to express my roots,’ he said. He was planning to tell his parents one day, probably just before his next visit to see them in Australia. His girlfriend came from Guangzhou, in China’s south, where she said the sky was blue. She had wanted to get a flower because it was feminine but wasn’t allowed. ‘I asked my parents and they said no way. Chinese parents can be very conservative,’ she said. Chinese characters, or Hanzi, had featured heavily in the West’s tattoo revival. The website hanzismatter.com was a hilarious read on the worst kind of cross-cultural miscommunication—tattoos inked into young American skin by butchers who saw the Chinese language as just another rosebud or dolphin, but couldn’t spell it. The funniest case I’d seen on the website was a young female arm with the Chinese characters for ‘crazy diarrhoea’ tattooed on the bicep. Cancel that trip to Asia.

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I noticed there were no Chinese characters on offer in Chinese tattoo parlours. And no gratuitous English letters either. • The more often I ventured downtown, the more I realised that Beijing princesses had it made. Racks of clothes that had somehow made it to the local market en route to Paris or London; the real thing in high-fashion boutiques; semiprecious jewels sold on roadside rugs by Tibetan families that had flown to the capital on the proceeds of their treasure chest but were still happy to bargain; and perfect nails and hair in salons everywhere. Flipping through Chinese magazines in Starbucks, stories on yoga, home decorating, rock climbing and cooking ‘West classics’ filled pages headed ‘consumption’, ‘modern’ and ‘love yourself’. They filled the space between glossy ads for Rolls Royce, Rolex, Prada and every premium handbag and perfume designer Europe and the United States could muster. For the first time in my life I felt pressure to be polished. Sky sent me to the top floor of the Yashow clothes market. Yashow saw busloads of Chinese and foreign tourists turn up every day to ride escalators to the tune of piped music as they filled oversized garbage bags with clothes. But it still had the chaos factor, so I enjoyed the retail therapy. On the top floor were the manicure booths. I plonked down into an overstuffed purple sofa in a row of ten identical others. The room was a purple haze: gauzy silk hung in folds across the ceiling, and beauticians sat at the feet of their customers on bright purple stools. There was

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no plumbing in the tiny alcove, so the dozen or so girls that worked there, stepping and reaching across one another, had to carry in tubs of water for footbaths and wax treatments from outside. But like beauty parlours everywhere, the purple parlour was a place to relax and gossip. The girls chatted intimately as they expertly soaked and shaped nails. My beautician quickly assessed that I needed the lot— manicure, pedicure, leg massage and wax treatment. My cuticles were thick and tough and she was mildly disgusted by my rough feet and the dead skin that took two loofas to slough off. ‘How often do you have this done?’ she asked. ‘Umm, not much,’ I admitted. She was twenty-two and from Shanxi province, where she had trained at a beauty school. She was shorter and had a rounder face than Beijing girls, but made up for it by wearing bright red lipstick and white patent leather high heels with pink bows. The effect was cute rather than tarty, teamed with cargo pants and a white polo shirt. Miss Shanxi said all the girls here came from outside provinces to work at pampering Beijingers and tourists. It was a popular but hard job. ‘We are here from the morning until night, every day. Even Sunday. Very long hours.’ The girl sitting next to her had taken a break from the frantic buffing and polishing to fetch dumplings for lunch. ‘What is the weather like out there?’ Miss Shanxi asked her. There were no windows in the building, although the airconditioning was some compensation.

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‘Sunshine,’ the girl replied, and pulled a small gingko branch with nuts attached from her pocket. She had brought a little bit of the outside sunshine in. As she passed around the gingko, Miss Shanxi asked me what it was called in English. ‘Chinese people use it for medicine,’ she said. ‘Australians drink it in fruit juice to give them energy and improve mental alertness,’ I said. They laughed. Weird. ‘At this time of year, Beijingers go to the countryside to pick cherries. The closest I get is picking a bag of fruit from the street stall on my way home at night,’ she sighed. Another manicurist sat down on the vacant sofa next to me and pulled out an exercise book. She pointed to the word ‘envy’, written in wobbly English, with a Chinese character drawn expertly below, and asked me to call it out. ‘Envy, envy, envy,’ the girls repeated. They were learning English from their customers. She turned the page and pointed to the word ‘detective’. ‘Why would you want to know that word?’ I asked, startled. She turned to the back of the book and began to slowly read out a story. ‘The police waited at the airport for the plane to land. They had received a tip-off that a man was smuggling diamonds. The detective was ready. But when the man arrived and his luggage searched, they only found rocks and sand.’ ‘Sand, sand, sand,’ the girls recited. She was from Harbin, up north near the Russian border, but said Beijing was a much better place to work. ‘Why are you in Beijing?’ she asked me. ‘I work at China Daily.’

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‘Oh. A journalist,’ said Miss Harbin, less enthusiastic now. I was getting sick of this reaction. Back in Australia, journalists often ranked alongside used-car salesmen and politicians in popularity polls, but the reception in Beijing was a new low. ‘No, I teach English to Chinese journalists,’ I said. It was true. My makeover was completed with a painful leg massage that dug into my bones. I almost cried out. It was hard work being a Beijing princess. Walking through the Pacific Century Plaza on the way home, I pondered the great leap Chinese women had made in one generation. Their mothers all wore Mao suits as teens, but now it seemed every snooty American and European clothes label wanted to dress Miss Beijing. If she had the cash. But what did Miss Beijing want? Despite the magazine advertisements, the glossiest department stores remained relatively empty on a Saturday afternoon, with more coiffed and polished sales assistants on the floor than customers. With time that would probably change, as the middle class swelled and the luxury villas being built for the glorious, modern, future Beijing filled. Perhaps Beijing girls would give up their beloved markets, and the combative interaction and shopping acumen they entailed, to follow their Western sisters down to the mall, where your credit limit was all that counted. I wondered where such a future would leave the purple parlour girls, who were already outsiders in this city. •

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Sky rang me with an invitation to come to dinner at her aunt and uncle’s home that Friday night. We would make jiaozi, dumplings, before going out. Making dumplings was a Beijing family institution. The jiaozi dough was mixed by hand and rolled out thinly onto a wide, floured board where it was cut into circles. The filling was scooped up from a bowl with a teaspoon, and the trick was to plonk it down squarely in the middle of the wrapper and then expertly fold and seal it with even, scalloped edges using your thumb and first finger. Mine invariably looked like squished blobs. Every family had their own secret recipe for delicious fillings that spanned vegetarian, traditional pork and chicken mince. Jiaozi was my favourite Chinese comfort food. Boiled, steamed or ‘stick-pan’ fried, slippery and white, to be dipped in tangy brown vinegar. Sky picked me up in a red taxi and we headed to her aunt’s place in the southeast of the city. She decided to teach me a bit a Beijing slang as we sat out the traffic. ‘Do you know er bai wu? It means stupid. You know, like Little Bush. Like George!’ she giggled. ‘Er bai wu,’ I repeated. That’d be useful. Sky decided I needed a Chinese name. ‘How about white flower?’ she suggested. ‘Too floral,’ I said. ‘OK. I’ll think about it some more. But you have to have a Chinese name.’ Sky’s aunt and uncle were typical middle-class Beijingers. Her aunt, Mei Lin, worked for a travel agency, and her uncle, Wen Long, for a bank. They were in their forties,

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could not speak English, and had a sixteen-year-old son, William. Sky spent a lot of time hanging out at their home, and told me she often holidayed with the family. Their apartment was small but comfortable with two bedrooms and a view over a river in a quiet neighbourhood. In contrast to the shabby communal hallway and bleak concrete lift area, it had been cleverly refurbished to maximise space, with gleaming white-tiled floors, tall bookshelves, a new sofa, dining table and a huge flat-screen TV and DVD system. Sky had pointed out that they were a two-computer household with a digital camera, broadband connection and all the other tech-gadget trimmings. Mei Lin’s shoulder-length hair was tied back loosely at the nape of her neck, and the red and white floral blouse she wore brought colour to her cheeks. Wen Long emerged from the kitchen, hands covered in flour, wearing an apron. ‘My uncle is a very good cook,’ said Sky. I gave Mei Lin a box of chocolates which she put on the book shelf, and we sat down at the dining table. She offered us a glass of beer. William, who preferred to use his chosen English name when conversing with a laowai, had a crew cut and towered over his parents. They explained his broad shoulders were a product of swimming competitively. Wen Long was also a swimmer and had the peculiar Beijing habit of plunging year-round into the city’s still-water lakes. I simply couldn’t understand the health benefits of swimming in green, stagnant sludge.

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‘I can tell you that since I started, I have rarely been sick and have never had the flu,’ Wen Long claimed. It was true that both he and Mei Lin looked younger and fitter than most Australians their age. Although Mei Lin worked in tourism, she had never travelled abroad and wanted to know what Australia was like. I gave her a book filled with panoramic photographs of beaches and the outback which I had brought with me from Australia. At my insistence—it was Chinese politeness to put presents aside unopened—she unwrapped the gift and studied each page intently, with the family looking over her shoulder. ‘Australia is very beautiful. It has so much colour,’ she said finally. Because she was a resident of Beijing, it was possible that if the family saved enough money she could travel to Australia as a tourist—under strict supervision. The Chinese Government had authorised Australia as a destination for tour groups in 1999, the first Western country to make it into the Approved Destination Scheme. The list of ADS countries was growing rapidly, and thirteen European nations had been added this year. Countries that signed up had to give certain undertakings. These included agreeing only to accept tour groups from travel agents approved by the Chinese Government, and closely monitoring the tourists to make sure they went home again. Companies had to promise to segregate Chinese tour groups from other travellers, and report ‘suspected, attempted or actual absconders’ to a Chinese absconder hotline within twentyfour hours.

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My idea of travelling was to jump on the internet and book a cheap airfare and make up the rest as I went along. Chinese overseas travel seemed impossibly restrictive by comparison. But for most of Mei Lin’s lifetime, international travel had been out of bounds for an ordinary person. The emergence of a tourism industry, even if it meant followthe-leader, was exciting. The world wasn’t exactly the Chinese tourist’s oyster, but it was starting to open up. William said he planned to study economics at university, and ultimately wanted to make money on the Nasdaq, or Wall Street, and become rich. ‘I’ve already started monitoring share movements on the internet with a play-money portfolio,’ he said. ‘William is ahead in his trading,’ said Wen Long. ‘William is also a talented artist. He came second in the provincial school calligraphy competition,’ Sky pitched in. ‘Can I see some of your work?’ I asked him. ‘I can do better than that. I’ll make you a good sentence,’ he said, and disappeared into his bedroom. He re-emerged with an ink stone, brushes and long sheets of white paper which he set up on the glass-top coffee table in the lounge room. I watched as he folded the paper into large squares, his guide for spacing each character, and then mixed the black ink powder with water on the stone. He wrote with a confident, smooth-flowing wrist action, pausing between characters to recharge the brush with ink. When he had finished, he rested the brush on a blue and white porcelain stand. ‘I love it,’ I said, after he explained it was a phrase about a journey from an island.

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My sentence was left to dry on the coffee table as we sat for dinner. Mei Lin brought out a salad of cherry tomatoes, a bowl of cucumber with garlic sauce, and two huge bowls of steaming jiaozi—one with white cabbage and chicken filling, the other herbs and pork mince. They were light and lovely. She kept encouraging me, as the guest, to eat more long after they had stopped. But I was stuffed like a jiaozi and tried to change the topic by pointing out the volumes on the bookshelf. I had spied a full set of Journey to the West. ‘That’s Monkey, isn’t it?’ I asked Wen Long. He nodded, curious about how I had recognised it. I told him Monkey Magic had been my favourite afterschool TV show when I was growing up, and that a lot of Australians my age knew the tale. Journey to the West was a sixteenth-century novel by Wu Cheng’en, based on the story of how Buddhism was brought to China from India by the monk Xuan Zang in the seventh century. But in this version, the monk was called Tripitaka and the epic journey was interwoven with the fantastical adventures of the cloud-flying monkey king, pig and fish spirit who accompanied him. It was a much-loved Chinese classic that melded folklore, religion, history and satire of heavenly bureaucrats, and still staple TV viewing for Chinese children. In snatches of appropriated pop culture absorbed from ABC TV, I quoted from the ancient book, to the astonishment of my hosts. ‘Born from an egg on a mountain top . . .’

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Wen Long, who had majored in classical Chinese literature at university, opened the glass cabinet and pulled down the books. ‘My favourite was Sandy,’ I told him. He flicked through the pages to find ink illustrations of Monkey, Tripitaka, Pigsy and Sandy. As a child, I had always favoured Sandy for his moon-face, hippie long hair and unusual beads. But in these classical drawings, Sandy looked scary and fat. I decided Monkey, the ‘Great Sage Equal of Heaven’ was my new favourite. In his yellow scarf and red tunic, Monkey looked exactly as I remembered. William was surprised at this snippet of shared culture and wanted to know what else Australians knew about China. ‘A lot of films. Chinese directors like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige are well-known names. And actresses like Zhang Ziyi from Crouching Tiger, of course,’ I said. ‘Zhang Yimou is very big now,’ agreed Wen Long. His new film, House of Flying Daggers, was due to have its premier next month in a huge event at Workers’ Stadium. The Chinese tabloids and entertainment shows couldn’t get enough of him. Zhang Yimou Inc. was so big in China now that he was even ‘directing’ light and sound spectaculars at scenic travel spots. Yangshuo, a once sleepy town outside of Guilin in Guangxi province, was a hot spot for package tourists in an area that had inspired the ancient phrase, Guilin shan shui jia tian xia—Guilin’s mountains and rivers are the best under heaven. New tourism authorities had felt the need to make them even better, and enlisted the director’s help for an evening drawcard of folk music and

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costumes that ranked as the largest outdoor performance in China. After dinner Mei Lin announced that we would go for a walk in the park. This was the Friday ‘night out’ Sky had referred to. And the footpath was indeed jumping as hundreds of nearby residents came out to play in the dark. The park was on the site of an ancient kiln that had been saved by the local residents and developed into a walled Ming garden. Wen Long paid for our one-yuan entry through a gate guarded by two stone lions. We slowly wound our way around the lake at its centre. ‘Beijingers like to play,’ said Sky. ‘My father says they are very lazy, always playing games and taking time for pursuits. People in the south are much harder working.’ I told her the Beijing way was starting to seem like a healthier attitude to me. Behind the chaos and bustle, it was a laidback and friendly city where people took the time to stop and talk, have a laugh or join in. At China Daily there was no question of people working through lunch or giving up their dinner-break dose of ping-pong to finish a story or finalise a page. Somehow, in the end, the deadline was always met. The only hiccup might be one of the night staff suffering a serious sporting injury from a match that got carried away, meaning they were unable to come back. ‘Come and dance,’ said Mei Lin, as we approached a group stepping ballroom-style to the sound of a portable stereo. We briefly joined in. Mei Lin was a perfect dancer, all grace and style. I was not. We walked on, passing

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teenagers racing dodgem cars and skating around a rollerblading rink. The kidney-shaped lake was thick with waterlilies. In one corner, unbelievably, people sat on folding stools fishing with rods for goldfish. It was two yuan for ten minutes, and one yuan per tiny fish if you wanted to take your catch home as a trophy. It was a spectator sport, and a small crowd looked on. A cool breeze lifted off the water. When we reached a playground of gym equipment, the family took to it enthusiastically. Wen Long and William showing off their muscles by lifting themselves up onto parallel bars. ‘My uncle was a gymnast,’ said Sky. Mei Lin and I skidded across a flying fox. We walked further and followed the sound of Chinese opera to a long white Ming pavilion that overlooked the lake. An elderly diva was singing to the accompaniment of her husband’s erhu. He rested the base of the instrument on an embroidered cloth on his knee as he played. They granted us an audience. The bright lights of the surrounding apartment blocks reflected off the water behind her, interplaying with the dark shadows of trees and creating a dramatic stage backdrop. It was Beijing night-life at its best.

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Campaign Against Youth Spiritual Pollution ‘Could you tell me what to do?’ pleaded Iris. ‘My teacher often asks me whether there are students in love in our class. I think she trusts me, but I must be loyal to our classmates. They are all my friends.’ Iris was a schoolgirl in Fujian province, thousands of kilometres south of the stifling hot newsroom where I sat staring at the computer screen, and her dilemma of love and betrayal. Around me, colleagues slumped dozing with their heads on desks after vigorous lunchtime ping-pong. It was my first day on the job at Teens, a paper that favoured spunky Korean girl-power movie starlets and Taiwanese popsters on its cover. I’d been thrown into the role of agony aunt and it was the toughest journalism assignment I’d ever had. What advice could I, a thirty-something foreigner, possibly give a Chinese child? The first email to the Heart to Heart column I’d read that morning was heart-breaking: a schoolgirl wanted to go 153

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to university, but could see that her parents were already sacrificing everything to send her older brother through senior high school. They would have to borrow money to send him to university, so how would she ever get the chance? ‘How can I even ask them? And what is the point of studying any more for my middle-school exams?’ she asked, signing the email ‘Sad’. In the not-so-communist utopia, access to education was far from universal. It was estimated 30 million children aged between six and fourteen had either dropped out of school or had never attended because of poverty and entrenched attitudes about girls in rural provinces. The government’s Five Year Plan for education aimed to eliminate illiteracy and give every child nine years of schooling. But higher education was also crucial for getting ahead in the competitive new China, where qualifications were everything. If girls studied and got a job that paid well, they could buck the stereotype of being a burden on rural families. But university fees could cost six times a rural family’s annual income. Sad’s situation was complicated. Not only was she a girl, but the second child in a country where urban parents were financially penalised for having more than one. I was barely aware of the enormity of the hurdles she faced. I only knew that education opened doors, and most Chinese parents valued it highly. The tradition of Confucian scholarship and exams had underpinned Chinese society for centuries before Lei Feng arrived on the scene. My advice was simple: she had to keep studying and not give

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Campaign Against Youth Spiritual Pollution 155 up hope. She had to tell her parents how she felt. It was too large a burden for a child to carry on her own. When I read the next email, from Iris, I immediately detected a cultural and moral minefield. The teacher was leaning on Iris to give names. Through Australian eyes, she was being asked to dob. This was China, however. What would a Chinese big sister say? I thought it over again and again, but couldn’t get away from a suburban Sydney schoolyard truth—no one likes a dobber. I carefully worded my reply. I told her that trust and loyalty were both important qualities. ‘Sometimes it is difficult to know what to do when they conflict. But would your friends be happy if you told the teacher about their love? Love is often a private thing.’ The column—my first and last—never made it into print. Iris was instead advised of the benefits of informing on her friends. ‘Young love’ was officially frowned upon by education officials, and by the time the Heart to Heart column hit classrooms across China, it read: ‘You must do what is in their best interests.’ It began to dawn on a failed agony aunt just how far the correct government line stretched across the newspaper floor. As far, it seemed, as a national teen weekly filled with pop stars, basketball heroes and the latest fad in jeans. • A fortnight after we returned from Sichuan, Ting Ting was dispatched to the Business Weekly office to break some bad news. Old Chen had decided I was to be moved to the children’s publishing division.

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The directive was worrying, because it raised real doubts that I would ever get to China Daily. I asked Ting Ting if it would be possible to stay a little longer where I was, and then move to the daily newspaper. In my best attempt at Chinese-style negotiation, I politely smiled and raised my concern that perhaps children’s publishing wasn’t in the spirit of the exchange program that had brought me here. I had been sent to China to work at a daily newspaper. ‘I don’t really know much about children, so I am not sure I would be of help, and I am learning a lot about China here on the business paper,’ I said enthusiastically. Laoban, my Business Weekly boss, had told me when I arrived that he’d be happy if I could stay on. Ting Ting smiled back. ‘I will ask the director,’ she said. I heard nothing more about it for the rest of the week, so assumed there wasn’t a problem. On Friday morning, shortly after I arrived at work, Laoban came out of his office and pulled me to one side. In a hushed voice he said he had been told by the Foreign Affairs Office the previous evening that I would be moved on Monday. He had since heard from his staff that I would rather not go. I nodded, and wondered why we were whispering. ‘I will speak to the Foreign Affairs director on your behalf,’ Laoban offered. I was grateful, but privately shocked that my request had been seen as something so controversial. Just before lunch, Ting Ting turned up at my desk. ‘The director has considered your comments and still feels it is best if you work at the children’s publishing division. You

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Campaign Against Youth Spiritual Pollution 157 will start on Monday at 9 a.m. If you have anything more to say on the matter, you must speak directly with him.’ When she had finished her spiel, she quickly disappeared back down the corridor. It felt like an ambush, designed to leave no time for further discussion. I was stuck at my desk as the deadline crunch for the paper hit. ‘I’m sorry this is happening,’ said Tom, watching from the other side of the room. The day dragged on as I waited for further news from Laoban, but the cavalry didn’t arrive. That evening, I dropped into the editors’ room on my way out the door to say a final goodbye. ‘I wasn’t able to speak to the director because I wasn’t able to find him. His office has been empty all day,’ said Laoban, looking up from under a pile of paper. Outfoxed, I thought. It was a simple yet clever tactic on the director’s part. Avoid confrontation. My cause wasn’t worth creating any more trouble for people who had to work here long after I left, so I decided to let it drop. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’ I walked out of the office feeling crushed. It wasn’t the fact that I might never reach China Daily that bothered me now, but the way my request had been handled. It was a small taste of what it must have been like to have your whole life managed from above. China Daily was still a rusty old state-owned enterprise, stuck in a time warp, where your work unit ruled your world. It didn’t matter what you wanted to do, if you were assigned somewhere, then that’s where you went. It was out of your hands. So

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then who really cared about what they did? The system was a passion killer. For a novice to communist-style career management, the situation was made worse by having no personal space in which to let off steam. I couldn’t go home to get away from office politics, because home was an extension of the office. They even had a key to my front door. I sulked in my lounge room in front of the TV, sporadically glaring out the window at the large, taunting office building with ‘China Daily’ lit up in red neon. I tried to watch a TV documentary about China’s triumphant Long March space-rocket program that had already screened twice that week. I decided to ring Australia for a bitch session. ‘This is such a waste of time,’ I complained down the long-distance line to a friend. ‘Oh?’ ‘They aren’t going to let me anywhere near China Daily and I don’t understand why! My visa and my whole life in China is dependent on them. They own me.’ I have to admit to a strong Australian anti-authoritarian streak. It was beginning to spill out from behind my best efforts at a mask of inscrutable and polite Chinese ‘face’. ‘I feel like doing a runner, just pissing off to Shanghai or somewhere to study. What could they do?’ I continued. A throwaway line in a private conversation. But in Beijing, the walls can have ears. In retrospect it seems paranoid to say that my phone was tapped, but that was the only explanation I could find for what happened next.

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Campaign Against Youth Spiritual Pollution 159 After that conversation, the lift attendants started to follow me home at night. On Friday I dreamt unhappily of police bursting into a hotel room past midnight in some far-off province to endlessly badger foreign reporters about why they were there. I had heard the first-hand account of the incident at a recent dinner party. Foreign correspondents technically weren’t allowed out of the capital to cover a story without official permission from the local authorities. At the time, we all laughed and said, ‘Typical!’ But that night it buzzed in my brain and in my dream the tale grew larger and the intrusion more outrageous. They had the key to my door. So the next evening it seemed just as dreamlike when I was fumbling around with my keys at the front door and looked back to see someone watching me. The attendant had stepped out of the lift, slipped around the corner and followed me into the stairwell. When I looked up, she slinked slowly back out of sight. It had never happened before, but on Sunday evening it happened again. Only this time, the attendant on duty that night, a different woman, had taken the lift up to the floor above me, stopped it, and crept down the stairwell to watch me from the dark. The floor above was mostly vacant and no one used those stairs, so I spotted her immediately, but tried to pay no attention. I was feeling uneasy about having suddenly grown a tail, and wanted to see what would happen. She waited until I opened the door before moving away. Inside the not-so-private sanctuary of my apartment, I dropped my shopping bags and stared at the white phone wire snaking out the door. Was it just Beijing paranoia?

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This sort of thing didn’t happen in Sydney, so how could it be real? I told Allison and Astrid over beers at Houhai lake, and asked what they thought. It was a question that needed a Western perspective. It was late afternoon and we were sitting on the island in the middle of the lake watching the crowd of paddleboats splashing by. Most were shaped like ducks and fish, although a few were green and sported flashing red lights and water cannons. The bar staff had the stereo cranked up, and the slow, haunting twang of ‘Hotel California’ drifted through our conversation. We burst out laughing and looked at one another when we heard the line about checking out but never being able to leave. It was this city’s theme tune. Astrid said it was likely that my phone was tapped. ‘At the Friendship Hotel there were cameras everywhere. It was wired up and you knew they were watching and listening. I couldn’t stand it. That was why I had to move out,’ she said. The Friendship Hotel was on the outskirts of Beijing and had been built in the 1950s to house and segregate the first Foreign Experts, mostly Soviet, that had come to help communist China. Over the decades, it had been a temporary home to countless ‘experts’ in education, science and media, as well as famous long-termers like the journalist and author Israel Epstein. Epstein was one of the first foreigners to be granted Chinese citizenship, was a Communist Party member and, despite being jailed during the Cultural Revolution, had stuck with China and was visited every birthday by the Party’s leaders. He’d earnt this

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Campaign Against Youth Spiritual Pollution 161 kudos by writing glowingly about the revolution from the early days at Yan’an where he interviewed Mao after the Long March, and later worked as a Foreign Expert Language Polisher on a Chinese magazine. Foreigners working at CCTV, Xinhua and China Radio were still required to live in the Friendship Hotel, and caught a company shuttle bus from the huge hotel to work each day. But it was an era in its twilight, because a law had been passed that would allow Foreign Experts to find their own digs in the city’s endless supply of new private apartments. Even the elderly Epstein, before he died in 2005, had been moved into a swishy, Party-supplied apartment. In the meantime, the Friendship Hotel had a pool and was famous for its barbecues. Other people who had lived there, like TV-star Margaret, said they knew their comings and goings were being watched, but they didn’t mind. ‘It’s not like they would ever use it,’ she’d reasoned. Reality TV had given Big Brother another spin for her generation. Being watched and watching didn’t seem so unusual. I enjoyed chatting to the lift ladies, and they were part of everyday life in the China Daily apartments. But there was a difference between passing on idle gossip and monitoring someone. I also knew it wasn’t their fault—it was their job. Another spooky thing happened that weekend. And this one was purely coincidental. I spent Sunday afternoon at a Chinese friend’s house in the west of the city making jiaozi. Pinching the dough into

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fat dumplings was a soothing way to forget about my office woes. Her apartment was in an old Soviet administration block that had been converted into housing, and an extended family of four squeezed into two rooms. At night her child and the nanny, a young cousin from the countryside, slept on bunk beds in the dining room. But it was a pleasantly large and airy space on the first floor that had windows overlooking a garden chirping with birds. We went for retail therapy after lunch, bargaining for shoes at a wholesale market. It seemed every Chinese girl I knew felt compelled to let me in on the secret of their favourite shopping haunt. I was catching the subway back to the China Daily compound when a middle-aged Chinese woman, with a face younger than her white hair and a book bag slung over her shoulder, sat down next to me. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked in excellent English. It was a suburban subway line and I must have stood out as the only foreigner. ‘Huixin East Street.’ We started talking and she told me she was retired and living in Beijing with her son. I mentioned I worked at China Daily, and she said she had once taught in the media course at a university in Sichuan. ‘That must have been fulfilling work, training future journalists,’ I said. A look of annoyance crossed her face. ‘I much preferred it when I was the editor of a newspaper, but I was labelled a “rightist” and sent away!’ I was back in the bad dream again, that parallel universe China. I listened to her story. She had worked for a

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Campaign Against Youth Spiritual Pollution 163 newspaper in China’s south, until the entire paper was shut down by the government for transgressing the ideological line. Some staff managed to leave and moved to Hong Kong where they continued working. She was not so fortunate, and was sent away from her family to a labour camp. ‘I was sent to be re-educated. But I would still prefer to be writing articles. I was a journalist for ten years.’ The re-education had obviously failed. Personal passions can be hard to shake. I couldn’t imagine myself in her shoes. Although anti-rightist campaigns were a thing of the past, newspapers continued to be shut down by the government and editors sacked. Already 2004 was shaping up as a year of media crackdown. A few months earlier, the editor of a hugely popular Guangdong paper, Southern Metropolis, had been arrested and two of the newspaper’s managers sentenced to twelve years in jail on trumped-up corruption charges. It was seen as political payback for the paper’s exposure of the death of a university graduate in police custody, a migrant from another province. The story had caused a national public outcry over the mistreatment of young migrant workers, who could be randomly detained by police if they could not show a local hukou—residence card. National legal reform had followed. This would have been considered a great result for an Australian newspaper. But in China, it prompted the local government to set an example. Rebellious media would be reined in and taught who was really in control. Southern Metropolis, with a circulation of over one million and lucrative car and real estate supplements, had found commercial success was no protection.

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As a Western journalist I had it so easy. I could check out any time I liked and go back to a country where I was free to criticise the government and report on pretty much whatever I wanted to. Only I didn’t want to leave. If I was here to learn about ‘something different’ that went deeper than tourist sites and Peking duck dinners, then I had to expect to step out of my comfort zone. This was the real China. On Monday morning I found my way to the children’s publishing floor. The ping-pong table was parked directly in front of the lift and I had to squeeze past quickly so as not to interrupt play. I passed a door marked in Chinese and English, Dang Wei—Party Committee. Within moments of arriving in the office and introducing myself, the telephone on the editor’s desk rang. She picked it up and looked over at me as she rattled ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ down the line. ‘That was the Foreign Affairs Office checking up on you,’ she told me with an impish grin when she had put the receiver down. Her name was Jing Yi, and she immediately struck me as smart and likable. It didn’t have China Daily’s grown-up politics and news but, as it turned out, the kids and teen weeklies would prove a fascinating place to be as the government stepped up its Campaign Against Youth Spiritual Pollution. • It had probably been quietly building behind the scenes for some months, but it was the decision on TV hosts that really got up people’s noses. Telling anyone how to dress

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Campaign Against Youth Spiritual Pollution 165 in a nation still getting over the Mao suit was bound to open old wounds. ‘TV personalities have been asked to abandon queer dressing and colourful hairdos and mind their language!’ the Xinhua news service cried. ‘The rule intends to reduce the negative impact of queer dressing and behaviour on youngsters!’ Shanghai Daily reported. Overly fashionable and sexy clothes, dyed hair, English words like ‘cool’, and Taiwanese, Japanese or Hong Kong accents and influence were all to be banned from television. Cops and robber dramas, and any shows that ‘propagated Western ideology and politics’ were also ruled out. The emails started flying. Attach story, forward, press send to all your friends. Cue indignation. ‘What’s this?’ ‘Haven’t these government officials been out on the streets lately?’ The noodle shop across the road from China Daily, where I ate most nights, was constantly buzzing with teenagers and a university crowd parading punky dyed hair, perms and piercings, as were similar neighbourhoods right across Beijing. And it was ‘cool’, regardless of the government’s dislike of the word. The TV hosts weren’t corrupting youth, they were just mimicking what was already out there. I couldn’t believe there could be a government crackdown on anything so benign. How could the Party encourage a generation to go shopping to build the new economy, and then decide they didn’t like what people were buying? It was the clearest

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case I’d seen of a collision course being set between the old ways and the rising middle class. As the ridicule grew online, the venerable China Daily editorial column chimed in. ‘A document setting out requirements for the dressing of TV presenters is by no means intended to limit people’s free choice of their clothes, but a necessary step to avoid the negative influences on the country’s youth’, it read. China Daily explained the policy was needed to put a stop to the inappropriate attire of TV presenters pandering to the ‘vulgar interests and bad tastes’ that were seen ‘as something trendy by young people’. Rest assured, it said, the country would not be returned to Mao suits. The new policies were simply part of a plan by the Central Committee of the Communist Party to ‘create a healthy social environment for the country’s young people in order to foster morally sound minds’. There were 367 million teenagers and children in China, and the Party had them under the ideological microscope. Hot on the heels of the dyed hair directive, more rules were announced. Websites that showed video, even home video or students’ digital recordings, would have to submit the clips for official film classification. Computer games would also be screened for themes that threatened state security, damaged the nation’s glory or disturbed social order. Among the more than fifty ‘unhealthy’ titles uncovered and paraded in the media was ‘Hearts of Iron’, which called for Tibetan independence and scandalously said Taiwan belonged to Japan. Sex, violence, superstition and gambling in games was equally frowned upon. Trotting out that

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Campaign Against Youth Spiritual Pollution 167 familiar line used to shut down internet cafes, ‘experts’ claimed computer games were driving teens mad. ‘Another example of the government telling us what to think!’ snorted one young reporter at the weekly news meeting of the student papers. She was a spunkily dressed twenty-two year old who liked to keep up with the latest in global pop culture. TV wasn’t her first choice of corrupting influence, the internet was, along with the DVDs distributed illegally on every street corner in Beijing. (Even within the China Daily building, each Friday a man returned to haul a huge bag of DVDs around the offices like Santa, offering films within days of a Hollywood release.) The crackdown was easily the most talked-about story of the week, and a natural choice for the main feature in the next issue of 21st Century, an educational paper aimed at university students. Tang Yun, a funky reporter with a penchant for extreme fashion statements, was assigned to write it. Jing Yi reminded us that France also had rules to promote its own culture on television. 21st Century had a weekly column reserved for a foreigner’s viewpoint. It was the only place Foreign Experts had permission to write. ‘The Australian Government owns TV stations, doesn’t it? Perhaps you could write a column about the rules that exist in Australia on what can’t be shown on TV,’ Jing Yi suggested. ‘Sure,’ I said, leaping at the opportunity. I wasn’t sure she understood that although the government owned the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, it had no say in what

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the station put to air. The ABC’s independence was guaranteed by an act of parliament. General rules ensured some Australian-made programming was shown each year, but these didn’t prohibit overseas programs. If the Australian Government were ever to try to ban a foreign cop show like The Bill, there would be an uprising across suburban lounge rooms. Foreign police drama dominated huge chunks of the weekly TV schedule. I didn’t point this out. I had an idea for another kind of story, if they would print it. ‘It is ridiculous to try and control youth culture. You can’t freak out that it’s not Chinese enough. Youth culture is a global thing, but it will inevitably have Chinese characteristics,’ I told Tang Yun, sitting in the cubicle next to me. He just grinned. The Communist Party was obsessed with ‘Chinese characteristics’. It was the mantra used to explain everything from big-picture ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ to urbanisation, legal reform and now the correct way to style teenage hair. I set about emailing the ABC’s head of entertainment programming, Courtney Gibson. ‘We don’t have any kind of formal ruling in Australia about how people should present themselves on TV, and at the ABC we don’t discriminate against young people,’ Gibson quickly replied. ‘Allowing teenagers and twentysomething Australians to express their ideas and interests on TV is vitally important, so that young people grow up feeling good in their own skin and are accepting and appreciative of a rich and diverse range of opinions and philosophies.’

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Campaign Against Youth Spiritual Pollution 169 I quoted her at length. Thinking of all the TV presenters I’d ever watched back home, I wrote that young hosts often had ‘queer’ hair, dressed flamboyantly, and boys even painted their fingernails and spoke in fragments of rapper talk. But while it may have been influenced by what they saw in America, Britain or Japan, the end package was still unique to Australian streets, and what we regarded as Australian youth culture. It felt good to express a dissenting view. But how was I going to get my story run? I reflected on the lesson in censorship I had been dealt at the business paper. There were ways around these things, if you were subtle. My first sentence had to be uncontroversial. I wrote that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation was sometimes called ‘Aunty ABC’ by people who thought it socially conservative. The story passed through the editing system untouched, under the headline: ‘AUNTY LIKES THINGS A BIT CONSERVATIVE’. The ‘experts’ Tang Yun spoke to from the Party-approved research academies dismissed youth tastes as a by-product of consumerism that should be discouraged. His story described the spread of dyed hair as a faster moving virus than SARS. Luckily, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television had acted to save a misguided generation. There was nothing critical of the government, but you got the message. Emboldened and enthusiastic, the team typed the headline, ‘DYED HAIR A NATIONAL THREAT’ into the computer for the front page.

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‘It isn’t a national threat. You won’t get away with that,’ said Jing Yi, sitting on a chair not far behind and watching over their shoulders. ‘How about, “DYED HAIR: TOO COOL FOR YOUTH”?’ I suggested. ‘OK.’ It was no longer the main story on the cover, but we were smug about using one of the words at the centre of the controversy. With our deadline met and the paper on its way to the printing press, we headed out for a late dinner at a restaurant. It was a weekly ritual and Jing Yi footed the bill because the youth publishing division was one of the few China Daily work units turning a profit. We ate and chatted about uncontroversial things, like food, acne and smoking. ‘Nice story,’ said Joe, when I ran into him the next morning. My column had hit newsagents and railway stations across Beijing. • When I arrived at the office the next day, our chairs had been pulled into a circle. A stack of freshly printed papers was passed around as seats filled with staff. The meeting opened, and it was time to criticise: yourself, your colleagues and the latest edition. I was fascinated, and took my seat in the circle but refrained from joining in. I wasn’t sure how negative comments would be received from an outsider. Jing Yi kicked off, turning to the entertainment page. ‘Why would our readers be interested in JLo’s secret wedding five months after the Ben Affleck break-up? It says here that it is her third marriage! Chinese girls do not want

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Campaign Against Youth Spiritual Pollution 171 to know about this type of woman. No one is interested in JLo. But I like the Avril Lavigne story.’ The Avril Lavigne story was a morally pure tale of how the teen singer had chosen not to dye her hair blonde and also avoided tight clothes and a sexy image. I stifled a giggle. We were being guided by the boss on the relative worth of American versus Canadian pop idols as role models. The meeting encouraged forthright debate, but there was general agreement that the story about ‘Love Nest Study Rooms’ on the campus page was of great interest. Sex at China’s universities was fraught with difficulties, mostly because there were few places it could happen. Students lived in cheap, crowded single-sex dormitories where up to eight people studied and slept in a room with a strict curfew. A minor scandal had erupted as couples looking for something closer to privacy had taken over campus study rooms. Classmates complained it was hard to stomach so much kissing and flirting while they attempted to swot. The story had posed the question: should there be special study rooms on campus for lovers? It was controversial because, as young Iris had discovered, Chinese students weren’t supposed to have sex. The official suspicion of ‘young love’ in her Fujian classroom persisted well past the teens. Although the marriage law had been changed in 2003 to abolish the need for couples to have a certificate of approval from their work unit to wed, the ban on college students marrying was still in place. The minimum legal marriage age in Beijing was twenty-two for men, and twenty for women. It had been raised in 1980 when the one-child

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policy was introduced; another way to put the brakes on population growth. Technically, you were thrown out of the education system if you wed or got pregnant. Some universities relented and granted permission to the few students who asked. But even then, married students had to live in dormitories unless they could afford to pay for private accommodation off-campus. It was a particular headache for older students swotting for postgraduate degrees. Most of the young journalists and page editors sitting around the circle were recent university graduates, unmarried, and still sharing dorms at China Daily. There wasn’t much room for privacy in this compound, either. I’d accidentally caught out one young couple canoodling in the corridors as I spun around a corner in a hurry. While official attitudes to sex were conservative, no one minded gore. The meeting’s attention turned to planning for the next edition. The Word of the Week would be ‘GI’, did anyone know what it meant? ‘It has been in the international news frequently this week,’ said the intern from Sichuan who edited the Language Lab page. The page was meant to teach teenagers about contemporary English buzz words. ‘Lots of GIs have been killed in Iraq, and there is a story about a bunch of them being sent to hospital with neurological damage caused by taking drugs in Afghanistan,’ she said earnestly. I flicked through the paper in front of me, and saw that Language Lab had a triple bonanza of buzz words this week: ‘abuse’, ‘decapitate’ and ‘behead’.

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Campaign Against Youth Spiritual Pollution 173 The word ‘abuse’ had come up constantly in reports of American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners, and gave an opportunity to reprint a summary of each grim tale for the kids. In retaliation, Americans were ‘decapitated’ or ‘beheaded’. ‘Both of these words mean to cut the head off. This is one of the more dramatic ways to end someone’s life and is considered uncivilised by many societies,’ Language Lab had helpfully told our teenage readers. As the meeting ended, Jing Yi turned to me. ‘Next week, Kirsty, you will need to find some criticisms for us,’ she said. I promised that I would. • With all the talk about rebellious queer hair, I was curious to find out if Chinese punk was more than just a fashion statement. I wanted to see a punk band play live. So one Friday night, Allison and I caught a taxi to Club 13, a bar somewhere out near the Summer Palace. As usual, the taxi driver had no idea where we were going. ‘You want to sing?’ he asked as I tried to explain. He was thinking ka-le-ok. ‘No,’ I said. We wanted to dance, like di-si-ke. I didn’t know the Chinese word for punk. Turned out it wasn’t hard—peng ke. Allison dialled the number we had been given for the club and handed her mobile phone to the driver to speak to the bartender. It was back from the street, a small entrance that would have gone completely unnoticed in the dark but for the ‘13’ lit up above the doorway in neon. A girl was vomiting in

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the gutter as our taxi pulled up. The driver was impressed. People drifted around the front of the club, beers in hand, getting some fresh air. Just inside the door, a table set up as a ticket counter sold CDs, T-shirts and buttons for the bands. ‘Liang wei—two people,’ I said. ‘Sixty kuai,’ replied a guy in a black T-shirt with a long flicked fringe. Punk came at a premium. We headed onto the dance floor. A boy with a cherubic face and full spiky mohawk was screaming into a microphone, thrashing an electric guitar around the stage. Every move he made was being recorded by people with digital video cameras, standing at the back of the room, around the edge of the stage and crawling high above it on scaffolding. They were students recording for a website. It looked and sounded good. The next band was chick punk. Two girls in 1950s Sandra Dee bob haircuts, with big guitars and a token male drummer. The petite lead singer wore a retro approximation of a 1950s American secretary’s outfit—white shirt, hound’stooth pencil skirt—save the big Doc Marten boots. ‘I want to put your member in my mouth, I want to give you head,’ she sang in English. ‘Wooo hooo hooo,’ chorused a guitarist in rolled-up jeans. ‘I don’t like yellow punk!’ they screamed together in the next tune. They had so much energy and attitude. The crowd was building and fans held camera mobile phones over their heads. The girls swigged beer between songs. When the set had finished, we headed over to the lounge area, backdropped by graffitied walls. Grungy clusters of

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Campaign Against Youth Spiritual Pollution 175 Chinese and foreign students kicked back, until the headline act leapt onto the stage. The lead singer wore tight black jeans, a singlet and an office tie wrapped loosely around her neck. She had a broad face, bobbed hair and big red lips that screamed and screamed and screamed. She almost swallowed the microphone. Her tiny frame hurtled around the stage and her left arm, tattooed with a pussy cat, pumped into the air. She was fantastic and the mesmerised crowd went into mosh overdrive. I thought about tattoos and punk, and wondered whether there might be a generation gap emerging in China. • I rang the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, which had a division dedicated to analysing youth. The reporter in the Foreign Expert was coming dangerously close to conducting an interview for a story. An academy professor I spoke to briefly on the phone told me to set out my questions in an email. I asked if there was a generation gap emerging in China, and what did it mean? I didn’t receive a reply. I asked another professor, from the prestigious Tsinghua University, if the internet had created a generation of young Chinese who were beyond propaganda. Why had the government shut students out of internet cafes? ‘Ninety-nine per cent of young people go to internet cafes for games, very few for news. They are not interested in politics at all,’ he wrote back. I thought that Rick, the star DJ on the radio program Joy-FM, might have an opinion on the generation gap. Each

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week, 21st Century ran Rick’s top ten song requests. His show was a bilingual mix of English and Chinese, and each night had an audience of hundreds of thousands of university students listening in to the music and chat. I arranged to meet him for a coffee at Starbucks. The location was his request. It turned out Rick was a fortysomething blond American from Detroit who had been working in China for eight years. ‘I don’t think it’s a generation gap. It’s more like a connecting to the world gap,’ he said. ‘Whereas ten years ago you didn’t need to connect to the world, now you need to.’ ‘Because of the internet?’ I asked. ‘I think the internet has a lot to do with it. You can get information from around the world and you don’t have to rely on local sources. They have a great thirst for what is going on.’ Rick received hundreds of emails and letters from listeners and spent a lot of time talking to students at their universities. One difference he had noticed over the eight years was that there was no longer a big drive to leave China. ‘This is the hot spot in the world as far as change, and they are aware of it,’ he said. I asked him about punk. ‘Westerners are fascinated by Beijing punk,’ he laughed. ‘But the average person is more into getting a car and taking driving lessons. They want a better lifestyle. That has nothing to do with punk. It is not a punk culture. They are saying, “We are the modern society coming up. We want to make money. We don’t want to make noise”. Punk is “let’s make noise”.’

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Campaign Against Youth Spiritual Pollution 177 Rick reckoned pop ruled the airwaves: Kylie Minogue, Celine Dione, Matchbox 20. ‘It’s not even a real rock place,’ he said. ‘I imagine someone who is twenty-five in their new Volkswagen Passat. They are not really interested in rocking so much. They want to sing along. It ties more into ka-leok than heavy rock concerts. It’s not a really rebellious culture, they just want to be tuned in.’ I could think of a few Chinese pop culture rebels—like the blogger Mu Zimei, a girl from Guangzhou who’d been kicked off the internet a few months earlier for writing about her sex life and in doing so had become a minor celebrity. But Rick had a point. Sky had told me her favourite singer was Sarah Brightman. • Despite the agony aunt incident, I was asked to give a workshop on Western journalism techniques. The only foreign newspaper I had seen for sale in Beijing was the International Herald Tribune, available in upmarket hotel lobbies. I borrowed a pile of old Sydney Morning Heralds from the paper’s Beijing bureau, and planned to photocopy interesting stories to hand out in my workshop as talking points. It took some convincing for Jing Yi to authorise my use of the photocopier. ‘Couldn’t you use the blackboard instead?’ she asked. ‘Not really,’ I said, exasperated. I remembered a Czech schoolteacher in Sydney, a friend my age, telling me photocopiers had been off limits at her university when Prague was inside the Soviet bloc.

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After Jing Yi had vetted the stories I wanted to copy and got the necessary approval from higher up, she accompanied me down to the photocopy room, behind a locked door in the China Daily building foyer. The uniformed photocopy staff took the material and recorded the number of copies made, before handing the thick bundle of paper back. ‘I think it would be better if you gave those to me to keep in my office overnight,’ Jing Yi said. It was as if we were dealing in contraband, yet the stories I had sensitively chosen were a funny fashion column, a profile of the Bush-hating American documentary-maker Michael Moore, and a story about plastic surgery where fat ‘oozed like the cheese in a Big Mac’. I thought it especially descriptive. Jing Yi had gasped when I pulled a copy of the Herald’s weekly magazine out of my bag. It had a photograph of a Korean soldier on the cover. ‘That’s the Model Soldier Lei Feng!’ she said. I assured her that it wasn’t, and showed her the story inside about Australian Korean War veterans. Persuaded that I could be trusted to take the photocopies home to my apartment to study before my speech, Jing Yi handed them over. I enjoyed the workshop, and the feedback it elicited. The challenges faced by young Chinese reporters included difficulty in getting officials to provide informaton or make any comments for their stories. Even ordinary people often refused to let their real name appear in the paper, fearing it might attract trouble. So just as reporters often used fictional pen-names, so too did the people they interviewed.

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Campaign Against Youth Spiritual Pollution 179 Or they just gave extremely common surnames, like Wang. It seemed to me this defensive habit was starting too early in life, though, when Teens was quoting prepubescent girls as ‘Wang, nine, who refused to give her full name’, in stories about class projects. The Campaign Against Youth Spiritual Pollution finally caught up with the student papers in a big way a few weeks later. The editor-in-chief, a clever woman who had built up the youth publishing empire from scratch, assembled the Chinese staff to tell them that the paper had been monitored by the government’s propaganda department. These powerful officials had decided the teen weeklies did not display sufficient understanding of the Communist Party’s modern guiding principle of the ‘Three Represents’. Young reporters more accustomed to scouring the web for news of Harry Potter or basketball hero Yao Ming were packed off to a two-day study session outside Beijing on Marxist Journalism Principles for Contemporary China. The Foreign Experts were not invited to attend. Gus and I were mildly disappointed that we had missed our chance for re-education. The ‘Important Thought of the Three Represents’ was a convoluted theory expounded by the former president, Jiang Zemin, that I had never managed to get anyone to explain to me in a few simple, short sentences. Perhaps a study session would do the trick. ‘That’d be intriguing,’ said Gus, as a group of us discussed the news at the noodle shop that night. ‘Something very different,’ I agreed.

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It takes a bicycle to put Tiananmen Square into perspective. Humans are too small, they become specks beneath the Heavenly Peace gate. Kites disappear on long strings to become dots in the sky. The cars and buses that race periodically across its vast edges are just a rushing tide of steel, timed to traffic lights. But a single bicycle swaying slowly, purposefully, around the immense perimeter with legs pumping hard, now that gives you something to think about. How many bicycles have flowed along Chang’an Boulevard and through this square in recent years, under the gaze of Mao, against a vermillion backdrop? Did the riders believe, or even look up as they pedalled to acknowledge the promise of the slogan, ‘Long live the Chinese People’s Republic! Long live the great unity of the people of the world!’ At dusk I stood watching. Lines of red flags fluttered like silk in the breeze. I was waiting for something to 180

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happen, and I knew at least a few people who would be aching to be here instead of me. Fifteen years earlier the humans weren’t mere specks; in their hundreds of thousands they had reclaimed the square as the people’s space. Chinese rulers since ancient times have known that power is bestowed by the mandate of heaven. An emperor who loses that mandate loses the right to rule. Without a mandate, rebellion becomes justified. But only if it succeeds. Fifteen years earlier, the tanks rolled into the vast square after the army had opened fire in the streets. I had sat in a much smaller square on June 4 two years before, filled with families, businessmen, professionals and students holding candles to the memory of the Tiananmen incident—even in Hong Kong the word ‘massacre’ was being erased from newspapers by editors mindful of the territory’s new landlord. Forty thousand people sat on Hong Kong soil to listen to speeches, poetry and songs. They helped one another keep the candles burning, relighting a neighbour’s flame as a gentle gust of wind picked up. The white church candles came with cardboard rims that someone had painstakingly cut out to protect the hands that kept them aloft for over an hour. Perhaps Hong Kong’s ambition for democracy, and uneasy position since being handed back to China, had kept the memory strong. I had been staying with Charlotte, the literary editor of the South China Morning Post. After the Tiananmen vigil, the biggest social event in town that night, we had caught a ferry back to the old beach apartment she was renting on an outlying island.

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We were lounging on the balcony sipping chilled white wine in the dripping midnight heat when Bei Ling rocked by. He was an exiled poet who had been flown to Hong Kong from America to address the vigil. Bei Ling was crashing at Charlotte’s too, and apologised for turning up so late. By way of explanation, he pulled a stack of name cards from his pocket. ‘Journalists, mostly young women, who wanted to interview me,’ he said cheekily. He flopped into a chair and announced he had a poem for Charlotte. She pulled another bottle of wine from the fridge, and as glasses were filled and refilled, Bei Ling reminisced over how he came to be here and the life of the drifting, exiled Chinese poet. Bei Ling was the quintessential long-haired Beijing arty intellectual, although he had studied marketing at university. He was visiting the United States when Tiananmen turned ugly and, like Chinese students around the world, decided to stay. His big idea was to launch a literary journal that took significant works from the West and translated them into Chinese. In 2000, when it looked like things were easing up in China, Bei Ling decided to move back to Beijing and continue publishing the journal in his home town. The first print run went off without a hitch. The launch party was booked. Unfortunately, the authorities took exception to some of the artwork, particularly a photograph of a tank. Bei Ling never made it to the launch party. He was arrested and thrown into prison. Independent publishing is illegal in China. Every magazine, newspaper and book is printed under government licence.

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His cause was taken up by the American writer Susan Sontag and the US State Department. He was lucky to be released after two weeks. But it was on the condition that he immediately leave China. Bei Ling moved back to Boston, where he occupied himself writing poems. He was about to take up the position of writer-in-residence at the New York Public Library, and said his latest project was translating the work of the former Czech president and playwright Václav Havel. Bei Ling was anxious to see if his appearance at the vigil had made the news that night, particularly CNN. He asked if he could turn on the TV. Soon enough, his face flashed across the screen. ‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘It’s great exposure,’ I said. ‘Yes, but what do you think of my hair? I wasn’t sure whether to wear it down or tie it back,’ he joked. The marketing graduate knew image was important when you were trying to make a point. It was currently down, silky black and past his shoulders, but on stage Bei Ling had opted for a ponytail. It made him look older and more serious, if less attractive. ‘Tied back is good, more appropriate for the occasion,’ I assured him. Bei Ling slept the night on the sofa and spent the next day bumming around the island, swimming and shopping for food at the local vegetable market. He was like an oversized bubbly teenager, warm and enthusiastic. I imagined him as a kind of modern-day Daoist. Certainly his hair tied up in an overflowing topknot, baggy trousers

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and Converse sneakers could have been a reinterpretation of the garb worn by the monks offering fortune-telling and talismans in temples that had reopened across China. But if that were true, Bei Ling wouldn’t be from the religious branch of Daoism, rather its philosophical tradition. His lifestyle of minimal possessions, living in the moment and wandering from speaking engagement to literary festival, relying on the hospitality of acquaintances, was certainly following wu wei, or nonpurposeful action in the pursuit of art. Two days later, Bei Ling announced he was leaving for Shenzhen, the Chinese special economic zone just across the border from Hong Kong. Shenzhen had more relaxed entry requirements than other mainland border points. A university in Guangzhou had invited Bei Ling to give a lecture, and he planned to stay a little while longer and maybe meet some old friends. He hadn’t been back to the mainland since his release from prison, but Bei Ling figured that was a long time ago, and the capital and the emperor were thousands of miles away. China had changed, everyone said so. I had been recounting my travel tales after riding the mainland train network. I gave Bei Ling a hug and wished him well. That night, after an evening of bar-hopping that fast emptied our wallets, Charlotte and I caught the last ferry back to the island. We were surprised to find a shaken Bei Ling sitting on the boat clutching a cloth shoulder bag. He hadn’t made it to China. ‘What happened?’ I asked him.

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‘They picked me up at the border. They knew I was coming,’ he said quietly. Bei Ling’s appearance at the candlelight vigil had been extensively covered by the Chinese-language media in Hong Kong. I guess you couldn’t have exiled celebrity without getting up the nose of the mainland authorities at this time of year. ‘Did they do anything?’ Charlotte asked. ‘They sat me in a room. They told me I can’t go back.’ As a precaution, Bei Ling had been travelling with another person, who went on ahead through the border checkpoint and warned the university of what had happened. The first thing Bei Ling did when he got back to Hong Kong was buy a mobile phone. He needed a little piece of personal security, a permanent line to the outside world, after sitting alone for hours in that room. He cut a sad figure that night, his charisma lost somewhere on the Lo Wu border crossing. Exiled poets might pick up the chicks, international invitations and frequent-flyer miles, but it was a bleak reality to never be allowed home. • A Chinese novelist I once met despaired that life on the mainland had moved on—without him. Ma Jian was an intense, serious man with a philosopher’s eyes. He said the idealism and sense of justice that Beijingers held during the democracy movement of the 1980s had vanished in his absence. Those that stayed behind in China despised those like him that left, he explained, and they accused the exiles of

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blackening the nation’s reputation by always dragging up the past. ‘China’s youth nowadays don’t like history. Even people in their twenties don’t know about the Tiananmen event . . . They always ask people to look forward to the future and forget about the past.’ The material lifestyle change that had swept Beijing had turned its residents into vegetables, he declared. He had entered his fifth decade and was living in London, admittedly an unnatural existence—‘like a flower cut off and put into a vase’. He missed his little house in a Beijing hutong, listening to people squabbling on the bus, and the smells of snack stalls. Each return to China had once involved detention and questioning, but Ma Jian could now freely visit. There were still restrictions on what he could publish, and he couldn’t write under his real name. His memoir was a bestseller in the West, but the Chinese censors had demanded changes. One paragraph deleted had pondered the iconic beat poem, ‘The Howl’. The writer had asked how Allen Ginsberg would cope in China for a month, because ‘everyone here dreams of the day we can sing out of our windows in despair’. • June 4, 2004, was a Friday. At 11 a.m. reporters and page editors pulled their chairs into a circle in the middle of the newsroom floor for the regular news planning meeting. Fifteen years ago campuses had been in turmoil at this hour, as students mourned classmates shot down in the side streets. The 1989 democracy movement had been led by

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Beijing students. But today the significance of the date didn’t rate a mention as we reviewed the week’s campus news. And it wasn’t my place as an outsider to bring it up. I remembered that piece of advice I was given on my first day in Beijing: ‘Don’t expect to change the world.’ Press freedom had bravely reared its head in 1989 as journalists and photographers reported on the street scenes, some even joining the protesters. But today the papers and TV news were silent. It was as if history had been erased. The rest of the world hadn’t forgotten. As I surfed the internet at my desk, I found commemorative images of tanks all over foreign news websites. I wanted to read the reports, but contemplated how I was going to do this without downloading the large repeated image of a lone student in the path of a tank. I did it anyway, hoping no one would see, but knowing I would welcome the conversation if they did. I learnt, via international websites created thousands of kilometres away, that on the other side of town thirteen people had been taken from the square by police that morning. Tiananmen was otherwise quiet. Many dissidents had already been forcibly removed from the city in advance of the anniversary, or ordered to take a holiday for the week. It seemed strange to be in Beijing and reading about it online without seeing for myself. After work, I caught the subway to the square for the flag-furling ceremony that was held at dusk every day. The number-one red subway line was packed. I looked around the carriage. Who was going to Tiananmen? Were the two middle-aged women in front of me Tiananmen mothers? They looked the right age to have lost children

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that night. Were the twenty year olds with punk hairdos and antiestablishment sneers going to the place where people their age had wanted to fight corruption and bring down the old men? At Wangfujing station, a crush of people got off. But only a handful of Western tourists disembarked at the next stop. Tiananmen station was deserted. People stared out carriage windows, looking back at the empty platform, and me on it, as the train pulled away. I climbed the stairs to the subterranean walkway that took pedestrians under Chang’an Boulevard and into the centre of the square. There were police at every corner. Just before the tunnel exit, directly below the square, a mass of PLA in green uniforms were frozen at attention in rows. I tried not to stare. Outside, I waited with the building crowd for sunset. There were Chinese tour groups in matching red baseball caps, young families sitting on sheets of newspaper laid out carefully on the ground, students crouched on their heels. An old man in a wheelchair was trying to fly a kite. Hawkers pushed icy poles, maps, medallions and patriotic flags from cardboard boxes. Yi kuai for a not-too-sweet orange ice, or double that at ‘two dollar’ if you were a foreigner. Small packs of twenty-somethings in baggy jeans and baseball caps worn backwards laughed and joked. There was a girl with pigtails dyed bright yellow that seemed to deliberately clash with her pink spotted shirt. Didn’t she know dyed hair was deemed decadent? Why was she here? Before, students wanted democracy. Now, they wanted to

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shop and be cool—just like Australian students. Except cool was banned too. As I scanned the crowd I saw uniformed police everywhere. The undercovers stood out just as obviously, swarming at dusk in dark glasses, constantly talking on mobile phones as they watched, as we all waited. The wait stretched to almost an hour. The man standing next to me struck up a conversation. He said he was from Shandong province. ‘I haven’t seen the flag ceremony before. It’s very famous across China,’ he said. ‘Why have you decided to come today?’ I asked. ‘I’m in Beijing for a few days to wait for a visa. I need to travel to India for some business.’ ‘There are a lot of Chinese tourists here, would you say?’ ‘Most have come from outside Beijing, I would think. Look, the soldiers are moving. It’s about to start. We should move forward. Can you see well enough?’ We shuffled forward with the crowd and stood on our toes for a better view. The giant red flag slipped down its pole and into the waiting arms of a rigid soldier. It occurred without incident. The Shandong businessman was disappointed. ‘I had always imagined that they would play the national anthem. Why didn’t they play the national anthem? It would give it a greater sense of occasion, I think.’ I shrugged. We said goodbye and I followed the dispersing crowd down under the square again. Walking the few blocks towards Wangfujing, I was joined by a university student. She said she was majoring in English

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and wanted to practise small talk. ‘OK. Why are you here?’ I asked her. ‘I come to Tiananmen whenever I need to practise my English. I can meet foreigners here.’ There was no other reason. Wangfujing was heaving on a Friday night. I sat down in McDonald’s, crowded with happy teenagers and shopping bags, and ate a Happy Meal. As I made my way back to the China Daily compound, I passed restaurant tables laden with abandoned feasts on the footpath. The leftovers were piled high—plates of beans, meat skewers and half-drunk beer. Life was good in Beijing these days, at least on the surface. • Sometimes lack of action can say as much as action, if it is deliberate. I found out later that one way of marking June 4 was to do nothing. Art galleries postponed exhibition openings and other events were cancelled. I discovered this a year later, when I asked an artist who was the right age whether people still remembered what had happened and marked the occasion. I had to ask because no one at China Daily, nor Sky nor any of the young Chinese I talked to in Beijing, had discussed the topic. ‘Of course I remember,’ said the artist, incredulous. ‘I was there.’ That weekend, wandering through a labyrinth of polished art spaces in a district where exhibition openings came with deep discussion and glasses of French wine or espresso, I was surprised to stumble across a large, turbulent canvas. It depicted Tiananmen Square, with tanks.

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Storm clouds loomed on the horizon as a red wind swept across the square and violent machinery rumbled in to fill the vast space. I was standing in a private studio, not a gallery, and an artist was working quickly with a brush, painting white characters over the top of the image. ‘How long have you been working on this?’ I asked him. ‘Two weeks,’ he replied. ‘What are the words? ‘My insurance,’ he said. ‘It is the date October 1, National Day, the anniversary of communist China. It’s when the military parade their might.’ It was sailing very close to the wind. I asked him whether the painting would be exhibited or sold privately. ‘It will never be exhibited. I have been working on a series of them over the years, but they will never be shown. No one would dare.’ Permission from the Bureau of Culture was still needed to hold each and every art exhibition in the city. Exhibitions could still be closed down. Artists and writers could also be stopped from exhibiting or travelling overseas if they were not on the government-sanctioned list of people with an approved creative vision of China. ‘Why do it then?’ I asked him. ‘I think that to record history is important. It is the only way that we learn from the past. And I am stubborn.’ He remembered history clearly, despite the media blackout on the event. But he said it seemed the young artists coming out of the art academy did not. Graduates were going into advertising and commercial design jobs, hoovering up influence and ideas from Hong Kong, Japan and Europe.

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The shock of the new and lure of money was their path forward. • Within days of the Tiananmen anniversary, the streets of Beijing were in joyful chaos. Morning classes were cancelled as students and teachers joined office workers pouring out of buildings to stop traffic. CCTV had devoted a channel to live aerial and on-the-ground coverage. I skipped my regular morning walk and sat in my apartment in front of the television, transfixed. When I got to work, the office was buzzing. Jing Yi said she had decided to hold the front page, due to go to press that afternoon, to make the street scenes the story of the week. She had requested a list of names of the students taking part, and assigned a reporter to interview them. The Olympic torch had arrived in China on its way to the Athens Games, and Beijingers were consumed by Olympic fever. ‘Have you seen the TV coverage?’ I asked Jing Yi. ‘There are masses of bicycles chasing the torch relay through the city. It looks like the police are having a hard time keeping them away from the torch-bearers. The crowds are spilling over the cordon lines.’ The public exuberance was way beyond what Sydney had seen during the 2000 Olympics. And the nationalistic fervour was unmistakable. Loyalty to the Party, for many people, had been superseded by a fierce national loyalty, and there was a strong desire to see China resume its place in the world. Nationalism had been prominent in the crowd

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at international sporting events that year, particularly at soccer matches. Sporting fervour was also on the rise. A month earlier, basketball superstar Michael Jordan had arrived in Beijing on a promotional tour. The crowd tore down billboards and climbed fences at Dongdan Stadium to get a better vantage point hours in advance of his first scheduled appearance. The police cancelled the appearance. Today’s enthusiasm was more contained. Our reporter wasn’t able to speak to the student torch-bearers, so we took an official Xinhua report: the Vice President of the Chinese Olympic Committee ran the first leg of the long journey to the Summer Palace. A model fourteen year old, dedicated to the Games and saving the environment, who had appeared in government advertisements to inspire Olympic spirit in the people, was also profiled. Basketballer Yao Ming carried the torch on its the final leg. We sat around the layout computer working on the front page. On June 9, the paper hit the streets with a delighted toddler in a red T-shirt, holding aloft a replica torch as his father waved the Olympic flag behind him. A Chinese flag took up the foreground.

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We were flying down the Jingjintang Expressway, five of us, in an illegal taxi with no seatbelts. Allison was stuck with the middle seat and had a clear line of sight through the windscreen. She imagined her face flying through it. Four pairs of arms stiffened as our black Santana, the stereotype of a hei che, or black market cab, wove in and out of traffic. The driver was playing chicken with tentonne trucks. It was a two-lane race to the other end. A cannonball run from Tianjin to Beijing. We were hurtling metal, and at least half of us dearly regretted being there. ‘If you ask the driver to put on his seatbelt, he will take offence,’ said the young man with metal spectacles sitting with Allison and I in the back seat. ‘Taxi drivers believe if they are good drivers, they don’t need seatbelts. You only wear them if you think you might crash.’ He had noticed the look of panic on our faces. 194

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‘He doesn’t even have a speedometer that works,’ muttered Allison. I looked across his shoulder at the dashboard. It was true. No matter how fast we went in this game of truck leapfrog, or if we slowed to miss clipping the rear of a lumbering blue lorry, the speed read the same. It almost explained the driver’s nausea-inducing accelerate, brake, accelerate. While the driver had nonchalantly ignored the seatbelt dangling by his side, we had no choice. None of the passenger seats had belts fitted. I told Allison I would fling my arms across to close the gap between the two front seats if it looked like we were coming to a sudden and final halt. She grimaced. ‘Foreigners tend to get upset with Chinese driving,’ continued our travelling companion. He introduced himself as Luo Bin, a university lecturer. It was the understatement of the year. One of the most confronting aspects of daily life in China was the complete disregard for rules, or human mortality, on the roads. A nation of novice drivers had been let loose en masse as car ownership suddenly came within reach of the middle class. The problem was, they had carried the attitudes and techniques that worked for a rolling sea of bicycles into the fast lane with them. It was a combination that was proving increasingly deadly as more and more people got behind the wheel in the world’s fastest growing car market, which also boasted the world’s highest traffic accident death toll. Of Beijing’s 14.9 million residents, two million had cars and a quarter of a million of the cars were new. More than

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half of the population lived in the dense neighbourhoods within the Fourth Ring Road. There were plans to move people out to satellite suburbs in an attempt to relieve the traffic snarl. But creating sprawling burbs would also give more people new reasons to drive. China Daily staff who lived outside the compound, in yet another company-owned apartment building, could climb aboard a company bus to travel to and from work each day. It was a long-established state-owned perk. But increasingly staff were ditching the bus as they bought their own apartments and crammed personal 4WDs and family sedans into the small compound car park. Having to catch public transport during the SARS outbreak the previous summer had scared a lot of people into thinking about car ownership for the first time. It was also the new middleclass dream. For young Chinese, a car represented independence, privacy and social opportunities. Young working women zoomed around the ring roads and adorned their zippy little hatchbacks with cartoon stickers as though they were the ultimate accessory, a giant handbag on wheels. But too often they were handbags to die for. Traffic was now the leading cause of death for Chinese aged fifteen to forty-five. The World Health Organisation estimated 45 000 people were maimed and 600 people died every day on the roads in China. Thousands were caught driving without licences or driving drunk in Beijing each year. In Shanghai, a third of traffic accidents were found to be caused by newly licensed drivers. When 21st Century ran a cover story on the new car culture, timed for the sold-out and frenzied International

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Auto Show, Tang Yun blamed the awful accident statistics on a simple lack of practice. ‘When young people first get a licence, they can’t afford to buy a car. So they just hire one from time to time, or borrow one from friends and keep saving. They haven’t had time to become good drivers yet,’ he explained. I wasn’t entirely convinced. When I had first arrived it had been a daily hazard to step off the footpath as 4WDs ploughed through pedestrian crossings and pushed their way against the lights. Red? What does red mean? Humans were expected to leap out of the way. Within a few weeks, the first Road Traffic Safety Law dealing with cars was introduced. It came into effect in a blaze of official media publicity. Traffic fines were increased, and for the first time drivers were expected to pay up for the damage if they hit a pedestrian—unless an investigation proved pedestrian suicide was to blame. Government statistics had shown drivers breaking the rules were the cause of the vast majority of deaths. When the first life ban under the new law was slapped on a hit-and-run driver, he was reportedly astounded to receive ‘such severe punishment’. After the traffic safety law came in, the difference on the roads was remarkable. The 4WDs began to slow down before ploughing through pedestrian crossings. Road rules? Speeding towards Tianjin in the black cab, I told Luo Bin: ‘Foreigners get upset with Chinese driving because it is unsafe. Look at how people drive! No one watches out for pedestrians. If you drive a car you have a responsibility, because it is a dangerous vehicle and it can kill.’

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‘It is usually the pedestrians that cause the accidents,’ he replied. ‘What?’ ‘There are far more pedestrians in China than cars. It is logical.’ ‘In Australia, people automatically blame the driver if someone is run over. It could be manslaughter.’ ‘So unfair!’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Two friends of mine, an elderly professor and his wife, were hit by a car on the road outside our university last month. They both died. It was a terrible tragedy, but it was their own fault. They were crossing the road and did not look where they were going. Why should the driver suffer for their mistake?’ ‘To me, that sounds like manslaughter. Where was the driver looking? What was wrong with his brakes?’ ‘But why should cars have to carry the burden of so many careless people? The pedestrians must mend their ways. Car owners have the right to drive on the roads. After all, they paid good money for the car.’ I asked Luo Bin if he had a car. ‘No,’ he cheerfully replied. Like me, he didn’t even have a driver’s licence. The average annual salary of a university teacher was 23 300 yuan, while the nation’s most popular compact car, the Xiali, cost 35 800 yuan. A Chinese-brand 4WD was twice the price. Luo Bin said car ownership was becoming more common in the small town where he worked. Traffic police had appeared at busy intersections to try to teach everyone—

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new drivers, pedestrians, bicycles, taxis and buses—to behave. An officer would stand at each corner with a red flag, and when the traffic lights flashed green, would shepherd pedestrians across the road and attempt to flag down errant drivers and book them. I said the same thing had started to happen at the closest intersection to China Daily, where a potent mix of university students, schoolkids, bicycles and bus commuters crossed busy Huixin East Street each day. Wardens in brown uniforms and hats stood under big beach umbrellas armed with a whistle and flag, and these traffic nannies weren’t afraid to use them. It was tough work, but perhaps physical intervention was the only way to change stubborn attitudes. ‘Just as well, now the law has changed, or the pedestrians will start throwing themselves in front of cars to take the chance to make money,’ said Luo Bin. I had often felt like defiantly striding across the road when the green pedestrian light flashed ‘walk’, just to teach the oncoming drivers some manners. But I was rarely so foolhardy. Our views on traffic were black and white, so Luo Bin tactfully changed the topic. He said he had been in Tianjin to visit his family and was now heading to Beijing for an academic conference. He liked working at a small university, despite its distance from the major cities, because of the mountains and scenery. ‘The air in my town is clear. In Beijing there is so much dust. I think it is getting worse,’ he said. We chatted about soil erosion and pollution. Luo Bin declared that China had to do something to clean up its

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big cities. Outside the car window, decrepit factory smoke stacks belched pus into the air, punctuating our sentences. The scenery shifted as the kilometres flashed by and we drew further away from Tianjin. Rice paddies, fish farms, a small herd of floppy-eared sheep led by a gnarled man in a blue hat. The sheep were being driven to the roadside to graze, stripping willow trees for fodder. I turned from the side window to look through the front windscreen—at a speeding oncoming truck. Allison was staring intently and quietly ahead. The woman in the front seat was also silent. She had black hair, but I hadn’t seen her face. The driver grumbled to himself, glaring over his shoulder periodically, yelling at passing lorries, shouting into his mobile phone, flicking radio stations on the dashboard with thick, broad hands. I looked back out the side window. Wheat fields shone like gold. Rows of saplings flickered silver green. The ponds of white duck farms. Piles of coal to keep the fire burning in the medieval, roadside brick-making kilns. Mysterious grey barracks that were numbered in rows. Canvas tents for workers. A glance to the front: looming huge lorry carting timber. It was a Sunday afternoon and I had convinced Allison to catch the train to Tianjin with me that morning, to search out a famous antique street market I’d read about. The city was a major historical port and only an hour and a half from Beijing. After fossicking around for jade cicadas and incense pots at the ‘new’ old market that had replaced the street we’d been searching for, we arrived back at the station in

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the afternoon to buy a return fare. Incredibly, we were told by the counter staff that the last train to Beijing had already left. I couldn’t fathom how two major cities so close would cease rail connections on the weekend by 5 p.m. We were standing in the bleak concrete car park outside the railway ticket hall, frustrated and considering our options, when a slightly built man carrying a plastic shopping bag full of oranges and a leatherette handbag approached. ‘Beijing? It will cost fifty yuan each. You can go now by car. No need to wait for a bus,’ he promised. He looked like someone’s husband. How dangerous could anyone carrying a man-bag be? We didn’t want to catch the bus. It would take forever and, because there was no regular timetable, wouldn’t even leave until the touts ensured every seat was full and another ten folding stools appeared from nowhere and passengers were squeezed down the aisle. In the split second you have to make up your mind about these things, we decided it would be OK. The fare was twice the price of the bus, but still less than ten dollars. We followed man-bag man across the car park to a row of waiting Santanas, the black taxi rank. He opened a door and we jumped in. Ten minutes later, two more passengers joined us. When it came time to leave, however, man-bag man had disappeared. Instead, another driver slid behind the wheel. He was huge and ugly for a Chinese, with a flat-top hairdo and shoulders that barely squeezed into his white T-shirt. Shiny leather office shoes and polyester slacks only heightened a general air of dodginess. His forearm wrestled the gearbox. My stomach sank. It was too late to change

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our minds. The car had pulled out of the station and was speeding through neighbourhoods that whispered of Tianjin’s faded German and French architectural glory. Into the suburbs, where towering white apartment blocks and a spaghetti bowl of concrete underpasses and highway flyovers sprouted rusting steel. At the city limits, old brick housing had been reduced to shanty dwellings with punched-out green-framed windows and roofs of makeshift plastic sheeting held down by small piles of bricks. Men flew phoenix kites on long strings, rising high above the mess. The Santana pulled onto the Jingjintang Expressway. From this point, it was our driver versus the trucks. Freighters with shipping containers, tractor transporters, semitrailers piled with soft-drink cargo—no foe was too large to take on. We drifted across the lanes, honking if anyone got too close. Honk and dodge. I focused out the side window. Through the willow screen on the edge of the highway I caught glimpses of red-brick villages built around ponds littered with a thousand multicoloured plastic bags. Peachtree orchards, beehives, bicycles bumping along country lanes. Three-wheeled motorcycle carts that had up to ten people crowded in the back. Farmers threshing wheat with sticks on the road’s edge. The occasional cluster of concretecancer apartments with blue tinted windows. Rusting solar energy panels. ‘If the speedo doesn’t work, what about the brakes?’ asked Allison, alert again and listening. ‘Westerners are too obsessed with safety,’ said Luo Bin. ‘At least it isn’t raining,’ I offered, trying to find a bright side.

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I remembered that rain and Chinese roads could be a particularly lethal combination. A three-hour bus journey along an expressway similar to this one had inspired a long and melodramatic entry in my travel journal two years earlier: ‘Sunday, May 5. Death Ride in the Rain’. After the experience, I had sworn off Chinese road trips whenever I could possibly avoid them. The train was infinitely more likely to get you to the other end. It had been a straight, fast toll road with a median strip of manicured lawn and shrubbery, but in those few hours from Chengdu to Chongqing, our Daewoo bus had passed three horrific accidents as brake failures sent identical tour coaches smashing into cars. The first had held up traffic for half an hour, and panicked drivers had run up and down the expressway as they tried to find out what was going on. People from nearby towns walked down from the surrounding hills and did what they could to help the injured, laid out on the road, as they waited for the ambulances to arrive. When we finally passed the crumpled shell of the bus, it was a sickening sight. The bodies of the dead were still trapped inside. The priority had been getting the injured out and to hospital. I saw a woman who looked like she was sleeping, but with eyes open, slumped against the window. An empty face staring through the glass. The passengers on our bus gasped at the wreckage, and the mother in front of me grabbed her toddler daughter who had been roaming the aisle. Everyone made a mental note of their seat position and what it would mean in a direct collision. I was sitting halfway back, which was better than the front rows, judging by what we’d just seen.

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As the rain continued to pelt down it seemed unbelievable when we passed another two bus wrecks on the same stretch of road in the next hour. One coach had flipped over completely, possibly trying to avoid an oncoming car that had leapt the dividing barrier. Our visibly nervous driver slowed down, but it was clear that the brakes on our own bus were unstable in the wet conditions. The karaoke TV was turned off and it was a silent, grim ride to Chongqing, the starting point of the Three Gorges dam journey, as angry Chinese holiday-makers glared fixedly at the driver. In the back of the black taxi, I could tell we were getting closer to Beijing. Village walls were painted with the blue and white, red and yellow logos of mobile phone companies. Flower farms grew roses for city gardens, to be transplanted in full bloom into the grounds of swish new apartment complexes. If only it was that easy for the people who lived out here, in brick shanties, to be transplanted into the glossy city life. At Beijing’s outer limits, golf carts zoomed around a lush green course. Advertising billboards beamed Partyland Karaoke TV, celebrity Foreign Expert linguist Da Shan’s unmistakable Canadian smile, tyre ads. We turned into the traffic clog of outer Beijing and crawled alongside Citroëns, Buicks, Hondas, Toyotas. Then when we thought the worst of it was over, the taxi pulled up unexpectedly under a bridge. The driver turned around and told Allison and I to get out. ‘We are going to Beijing railway station,’ I said, confused. This is what had been agreed with the man in Tianjin. It

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was where all the black taxis and buses from Tianjin railway station went. The driver loudly demanded we pay him another fifty yuan each to be taken to the railway station. It was double the originally agreed fare, and he was only demanding the money from us, not Luo Bin or the woman in the front seat. I could smell a scam coming on, but couldn’t believe his audacity. ‘We are not paying it. We are going to Beijing railway station,’ Allison said firmly. The driver started yelling. Luo Bin tried to reason with him. ‘There’s no problem here. I want to go to the railway station. The girls want to go to the railway station. We are all going to Beijing railway station together. It is no extra bother for you,’ he said. But the driver didn’t want to hear it. He screamed that the foreigners were going to pay double for his time. It was getting ugly. ‘We’re only giving him fifty. Let’s get out now,’ Allison said, urging me to move. I opened the door but before she could slide out, the driver had spun around in his seat and grabbed hold of her. His large fingers dug into her waist and hauled her back into the car. She wrenched his hand off, but in an instant he had lunged again, grabbing her bag with her money and passport inside. It was a tug of war. I stood outside the car, yelling in Chinese for the police. But there was no one around, just traffic. There was no question of us going anywhere without her bag.

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My new friend Luo Bin sat in stunned silence. He wanted everyone to calm down. ‘You should get back in the car. We will all go to the railway station. The driver has misunderstood,’ he said. We had no choice. I got back in and shut the door. The driver put his foot on the accelerator. Luo Bin couldn’t believe what was happening. He was a visitor to Beijing, and didn’t usually travel with laowai. Were we being cheated? We were. There was no misunderstanding. Why? He went through the sequence of events, talking aloud in English. ‘Of course the girls wanted to go to the train station, just like the two Chinese passengers are going there. We all agreed to the same price.’ We were being ripped off, violently. There was nothing he could do about it. He was pale, small, bespectacled. The driver was still ranting about more money and had maintained his grip on Allison’s bag as he drove on, onehanded. I was apprehensive about what would happen when Luo Bin and the woman left the car. What could the driver do to us? Who else was waiting at Beijing railway station? It was a heaving sea of humanity, where thousands rushed through to long-distance trains, pick-pockets worked the queues and migrant workers slept out rough on rice sacks and cardboard. I realised we had to get out of the car while Luo Bin was still there as a witness, and before we got to the station and the chaos of ten thousand people but no one watching. By the time we reached the Jianguomen traffic clog, I didn’t need the speedometer to tell me the car had slowed

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down. We were a few blocks away from the station. The driver switched his focus to the road as he attempted to change lanes before the turn-off. We had to act now. I threw a hundred yuan into the front seat and flung open the door, jumping into the traffic and giving Allison room this time to leap out behind me. The driver spun around and grabbed Allison’s shirt, ripping off a handful of cloth as she forced her weight out of the vehicle. I stumbled and ran through the cars, not caring about the oncoming red Xialis. Allison had her bag and was behind me. For the first time, traffic was my friend, a welcome refuge. We kept running until we reached the John Bull. Inside the pub, among the rugby and cricket memorabilia, below the Foster’s Lager clock, I felt safe. ‘Ohmigod! What just happened?’ gasped Allison. ‘He could have done anything. He was going to beat the crap out of us!’ I speculated. ‘What a pig. Obviously not a Beijinger.’ ‘I can’t believe he pulled that. It’s not supposed to happen here. Thailand, India, yeah. But not China. I’ve always, always felt safe.’ I was angry. Traffic chaos and road danger I understood, but not this kind of scam. China was indeed changing.

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The summer heat in Beijing seeps like a smog through your brain. Each breath of thick air crawls down the throat, sinks into the lungs and sticks there. I could see my feet walking, one step after the other, but I barely knew it. They took me to Wu-Mart, the discount department store, to buy an electric fan. It only whirred the warm sludge around my lounge room. I ate tubs of green tea ice cream in vain. Icy poles that were shaped and tasted like corn cobs didn’t work either. I would have liked to try Beijing men’s perennial summer fashion statement, of pulling T-shirts up to armpits to expose and cool large fleshy stomachs, but modesty prevented it. The daylight was crushing and had an eery orange tinge as the sun’s rays battled through a chemical-filled, particlecharged atmosphere. At night the heat was white and heavy on my shoulders. Beijing had become a nocturnal city, where no one slept day or night. The old people stirred to life at sunset, coming down from their kitchens to sit on the 208

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footpath on small folding stools, to wave themselves awake with oriental fans and gossip. Middle-aged men in white singlets and grey rolled-up trouser legs drank beer into the small hours, camping around restaurant tables, the growing pile of sunflower husks in the middle marking time. My Chinese colleagues slept at their desks from noon. There was no airconditioning in the office. I wasn’t certain whether this was China Daily penny-pinching or part of the government’s drive to conserve energy. Cities across the eastern coast had been afflicted by brown-outs as demand for electricity surged, residents competing with booming factories for precious power. In some cities, businessmen were urged to wear short sleeves and ditch ties, while manufacturers suffered scheduled shutdowns or were ordered to switch to night-time production. The power stations were struggling to keep pace with China’s economic miracle and even the railways copped some of the blame for bottlenecks and delays in transporting black, polluting coal. The press ran stories on the tendering process to build five new nuclear power stations. French and American companies were vying to sell China nuclear technology. Overriding any Cold War qualms about communists and nuclear weaponry was the simple reality that China, supporting 22 per cent of the world’s population, urgently needed clean energy and clean air. Jing Yi complained that the remote control for her bedroom airconditioner had broken in the night. The batteries went flat after the stores had closed, so there was nothing she could do but suffer the heat. The dark shadows under her eyes conveyed her sleeplessness.

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The Foreign Affairs Office sympathetically issued each Foreign Expert with a case of Coca-Cola or Pepsi (they were agnostic in the cola brand wars) for the fridge. I drank it for breakfast with rice. The heat heralded food-poisoning season. The paper devoted a double-page spread to the topic. Hospital emergency rooms had seen an explosion in doubled-over, vomiting, shitting, groaning victims. It happened every year. It was time to selectively avoid meat. Unrefrigerated piles of pink pork mince and beef cuts sat exposed to flies on a soggy wooden board in the street-side meat window of the supermarket on Huixin East Street, conveniently located across the road from the hospital. I watched the noodle shop take delivery of vegetables and unrefrigerated hunks of meat each morning. The waitresses washed down the pavement before sitting in a circle to chop ingredients directly on the bare ground. Explosion frying in a wok later helped kill bacteria, but the airconditioning in the noodle shop couldn’t keep pace with forty-degree days. China Daily said vegetables should be scrubbed and soaked for half an hour before use because of pesticide. One of my Chinese colleagues was growing her own hydroponic bean sprouts and greens because of her fear of chemicals. It was time to stop cooking and eating on the street, and time to leave it to the experts, our neighbourhood restaurants. I pondered moving to a diet of all kaoya, because Peking ducks came hot from the wood-fired oven direct to the table. In the heat, Joe brought his kittens out each evening to play on the grass in the compound garden. He had kittens?

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I joined him under the trees and watched. He looked over them like a proud father, gently guiding them back to a cardboard box if they strayed too far. They had a strand of red wool tied loosely around their bellies, but the leash was unnecessary. The cats were timid in the great outdoors, afraid of the trees, quizzical of the dirt. They clung to Joe, a man who sent his girlfriends packing because he was wary they might become too attached. ‘They sleep on my pillow at night, one on either side of my face. This is Chairman Mao,’ he said, calling the ginger kitten with a click of the fingers. Joe told me he was starting to worry about what would happen to his cats when he left China. The lone wolf had set down roots. He was due to go in two months and was asking around to see if anyone would take them, while researching the background of animal refuges. The paper reported that the local government was set to pass a law enshrining animal rights in the city. It raised immediate, unspoken ironies about human rights. The story was quickly retracted. Ashley and Nikki had already left, farewelled with drinks and gone the next day. They wouldn’t be back. ‘China and I didn’t work. I’m outta here,’ said Nikki with a wide grin the night before she left for Bangkok and a new job in another Asian city. The boys slid into a dishevelled state, stopped shaving and grew mullets. They were working six days a week at Teens and its younger offshoot, Kids, and shuffled the hallways in grungy shorts with holes and threadbare, sweatstained T-shirts.

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Everyone nursed a secret, heat-born illness. Alex finally collapsed at his desk and was taken to the public hospital, where the nurses put him on a herbal drip that brought him out in spots. He decided henceforth to avoid hospitals that prescribed Chinese medicine and didn’t speak English. This was a problem because China Daily’s medical insurance didn’t stretch to the private American clinic used by foreign diplomats, only to the hospital down the road. Alex holed up in his room instead to sleep it off. ‘Go away,’ he moaned through the door, spurning soccer and Sanlitun and Chinese classes. But he went too far when he told Zhi Mei, an enterprising young Chinese office worker who had taken on the job of cleaning the boys’ apartments at the weekend for extra cash, to go away. ‘Not today. Thank you. I’m too ill.’ ‘Why not?’ she demanded through the shut door. Zhi Mei looked forward to practising her English, and Alex was a favourite. ‘I need sleep,’ came the groan. The door remained shut. Zhi Mei stormed off. She returned later in the day with a long, handwritten letter that she pushed under the door. When he read it, Alex was astonished at the size of his faux pas. According to the letter, it was an appalling insult to refuse to see friends when you were ill. ‘This is exactly the time when you should welcome friends bearing large watermelons for good health. But perhaps I am not a friend, just the cleaner?’ Zhi Mei charged. ‘I had no idea. She was so articulate . . .’ said Alex.

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The hot days dragged on. We pooled appetites for dinners at the duck place down the road, collecting the carcass in a doggy bag to pass to the homeless woman camped out the front of the China Daily gate. She was ancient and filthy, clad in traditional blue shirt and black pants that were fading, like her. She slept by day and was fed at night. It was a middle-class neighbourhood where diners often had too much food. On Saturday nights we shuffled to the pool tables on the third floor of the local hotel. Dodgy calligraphy scrolls hung for sale to Chinese tourists in the window, while migrant workers who couldn’t afford bottled water drank the scungy green liquid from the fountain out the front instead in abandoned McDonald’s cups. The pool hall, always full of young Chinese, had a no-alcohol rule but plenty of smoke. Chinese tobacco companies were often state-owned. Ben, a cool American who’d arrived at China Daily after teaching in the provinces, revealed his relentless stomach cramps, diarrhoea and gas. A group consultation of Lonely Planet’s health chapter diagnosed that we all had giardiasis, or maybe typhoid. Probably giardiasis. Ben visited the pharmacy, the one with the deer antlers, carrying a piece of paper with the Chinese name for the self-prescribed antibiotic needed to cure all. You could get almost anything over the counter here, or its cheaper Chinese alternative. There was even a no-frills version of Prozac, sampled by some of the older tribe. But I didn’t know what to do about my coughing up blood at night. I decided to ignore it. When it eventually stopped a year later my Sydney

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specialist shrugged his shoulders and I put it down to toxic smog. In the heat, Beijing life was losing momentum. Chloe decided to reinject some sparkle. She extended the shrinking tribe an invitation to an exclusive fashion parade, billed as a special event for ‘a top Beijing clothes label’. ‘Please come. But you must RSVP and dress up!’ she insisted in the group email. Chloe had told the parade organisers she would bring an international media contingent. They had stipulated entry would be by invitation card only. ‘Thongs and ripped T-shirts will not cut it,’ she warned the boys. They feigned offence, but shaved anyway. It was a Saturday night and the event was to be held at the Kempinski Hotel, an upmarket venue on the Third Ring Road renowned for its deli, German sausage and Norwegian salmon. Anticipating tall models and promised free cocktails and canapés, the tribe started buzzing again. Mullets were combed and outfits carefully assembled. Alex and Ben decided to go for the pimp-daddy rap look, sourcing shiny black faux croc-skin shoes from a street market. Ben teamed his with a pink open-necked shirt, brown trousers and a fedora. Alex fished out his traveller’s standby of white waiter’s shirt, which he paired with local polyester pants. Miraculously, an iron was found. I panicked, remembering the glam crowd at 798’s ‘So Cool’, and hit Wangfujing. I discovered a waify Chinese label and chose a deconstructed, long black skirt. When I emerged from the changeroom I realised the look was neither waify or deconstructed when combined with Western hips.

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But it would do. Steve found an electric-coloured beach shirt and Ralph went Hawaiian. We arrived by taxi convoy and strutted into the chilled air of the Kempinski’s foyer, an atrium lined with giant potted bamboo and oversized bonsai. The international media contingent handed over cards to waiting ushers and were directed up a sweeping staircase. At the top, the customary table was laid out with champagne glasses. But where was the champagne? We were guided past the empty crystal and into a room where a long, black catwalk had been erected under intense floodlights. We took up seats in the front row. Under each chair was a show bag, filled with magazines and a boxed cashmere scarf. ‘The label is known across Europe for its fine quality cashmere, and is now ready to take the next leap and extend its name with a ready-to-wear fashion collection,’ the blurb gushed. A thirsty international media contingent waited in anticipation. The room filled with photographers and Chinese rag trade reporters. After a call was made for silence and the lights dimmed, the company’s entire board of directors took to the catwalk in short-sleeved business shirts and excitedly clapped one another on in making long, courteous speeches. The managing director hobbled up with a broken leg in a cast. When the self-congratulation stopped, the music started with a bang. Long-limbed models tottered past on high heels. They were wearing what could have been mistaken for bum-skimming, oversized sweaters. There were woolly dresses, hairy skirts and knitted jackets. Then the evening

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gown collection showcased cashmere by night: midnight blue festooned with glittery sequins. As the sweaters got smaller and the odd breast fell astray, sections of the international media contingent leapt up with cameras flashing enthusiastically. The board looked pleased. Fortunately, there was no swimwear section. But there had to be the token blondes. A pair of pale Russian girls with visible track marks puncturing blue veins, razor nicks and tufts of leg hair escaping sheer stockings, sashayed bored and indolent down the narrow runway. ‘I wonder what their day job is?’ quipped Chloe. I had overheard a loud conversation one day while trying to concentrate on eating a spicy Serbian chicken sandwich at the outdoor kiosk in Sanlitun’s Nali courtyard. ‘Russian women are worse than dogs. They would fuck anything for a cigarette,’ the elegant Chinese girl at the next table had told her male friend. She was practically shouting as they discussed their Russian colleague. ‘All day, I pass on calls from his fucking whores. He is not even embarrassed about it, making times to have sex. I have work to do, not this, and so should he.’ Russian fur traders dealing in racks of mink coats were a fixture in some parts of the city, and Soviet engineering and education had made its contribution in the early decades of the People’s Republic. But in the new era, this girl obviously felt Beijing was being overrun with illegal, female economic refugees from across China’s northern border. Her colleague’s little sideline had come unstuck and he had been beaten up. The Russian Embassy could hardly help,

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she laughed blackly, he was here on false papers. ‘I wish they would all go home,’ she sighed. The fashion finale was truly a show stopper. Thin, bony legs clomped down the catwalk in orange ski boots smudged with the tell-tale black marks of previous use and probably salvaged from a rental store. They were wearing cashmere jumpsuits. We clapped furiously, to the delight of the board. I wrote my hypothetical fashion review in my head: Hardly up there with Beijing’s funky design new wave, but very street China, as in the real suburban streets, where old aunties dagged around hutongs in whatever they found comfortable, and they loved sparkle. Now, where was the champagne? The board led the way back into the reception area to mingle with the models. The tables of empty flutes were being filled—with water. There were no canapés and there would be no cocktails. Not even juice. Starving and disappointed, the international media contingent escaped downstairs to the Kempi deli for takeaway sandwiches. That night it was Canadian Foreign Expert Archie’s turn to be farewelled. In the city’s Russian enclave, the Slavic buffet at The Elephant came with a floor show of nearnaked Brazilian dancers dressed for the heat. • A week later, and three days after his scheduled flight and fully-paid seat had taxied down the runway without him, Archie was still in Beijing. ‘Eh, laowai!’ The call had followed me as I walked into the noodle shop for a cold tomato and egg noodle lunch. I chose to ignore it.

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‘Laowai, laowai,’ the call grew louder and more insistent. I bristled. I was not going to be an outsider in my noodle shop. I wouldn’t look. ‘Laowai!’ Other people were staring now. The voice dissolved into giggles, and I spun around to confront the caller. It was Archie, with a bemused Chloe. ‘Gotcha!’ he said. ‘Not a bad Beijing accent, pity it’s the only word of Chinese you know after a year. What are you doing here?’ I asked him. ‘Cadging lunch from anyone who can shout me,’ said Archie. He told me the Foreign Affairs Office had stopped him from leaving China. Archie had been unable to find his Foreign Expert Certificate, the little red book issued twelve months prior. They demanded it be surrendered to the office, in strict accordance with the Foreign Expert rules. Without it, Archie had to face the consequences. This meant presenting himself to the Public Security Bureau to explain his carelessness. There, he had to pay a penalty and a fee to cover the compulsory advertisement in national newspapers that would notify China he had lost the document. Issuing a new certificate took several days, and in the meantime Archie was out of renminbi, the people’s currency. He didn’t want to waste the precious American dollars he had scrounged on the black market to use when he landed in the outside world. He had discovered that local banks wouldn’t convert his Chinese cash savings from his China Daily salary because he had earnt the money

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here. Older and wiser Foreign Experts had negotiated to have part of their salary paid in American dollars each month. Life was becoming a real bitch and Archie couldn’t wait to get out. For me, Archie’s exit was good news. It left China Daily short of staff, and I became his replacement on the China Daily polishing desk. My first shift was a Sunday night. I had finally made it to the daily paper and was elated. At the afternoon news conference, the editing staff gathered around a large table to discuss the day’s stories. The night editor was an energetic young man who was a patient listener. Chinese newspaper life was, in some ways, more familiar than I had expected. Regardless of whether you spoke English or Chinese, a daily paper had its own universal language of fast deadlines and news. If you ignored the unspoken politics—which could be like trying to tiptoe around a large grey elephant plonked in the corner of the newsroom and painted bright red with the characters for Party line—Chinese journalists were interested in the same social issues as Australian ones. Stories spanned traffic chaos, environmental degradation, health, crime, gender equality and education. The rapid social change swirling outside the compound gates, and the new commercial pressure to sell newspapers, was sharpening China Daily’s focus on connecting with its readers. The designer was a hot shot hired from Hong Kong to revamp the look of the paper. China Daily was scheduled for transformation from nonprofit propaganda broadsheet to contemporary, vibrant reading. It was hoped advertising, to pay wages, would follow.

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Already that year, a light-hearted column called China Scene had been introduced, drawing together the most bizarre stories of the day from papers across the nation: a rag collector is expected to fulfil his dream to collect garbage on the world’s highest peak, Mount Qomolangma; a young man in Nanjing went to hospital and asked to have his ears changed to look like those of an alien because he wanted to appear more interesting; a teacher in Anhui province was discovered to be illiterate, despite ten years of work; a farmer in Gansu province had formed a habit of drinking machine oil. ‘They can’t be true. Surely they are made up?’ a worldly Australian foreign correspondent asked me, after admitting she read the column every day. I told her the stories were real. ‘I’m not sure that such frivolity is appropriate in a newspaper. Is it common in the West?’ asked Old Chen. Although the stories were certainly unique to China, I told him frivolity was often required reading. But change could only be made with small steps. The designer’s one wish—to ditch the tradition of the repeated image on the front page of the Chinese president shaking hands outside the Great Hall of the People—was met most days with the response: ‘We can’t. This is China.’ Each morning the paper was pinned, page by page, to a wall in the newsroom. It was a tradition that invited anyone who could spot a mistake to criticise. Errors were circled in red pen and comments added anonymously. For the Chinese, it was a process they had grown up with. Criticism led to improvements in the work unit.

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Unfortunately, the foreigners were emotionally unequipped to handle it. They went overboard with the red pen, but were in turn thin-skinned. I was warned of major feuds and in-fighting that had resulted from bitchy complaints scrawled on the wall for all to see. They only ever turned on each other. Nothing was forgiven or forgotten. Maybe it was the heat. And the polishing desk was small. Four foreign staff processed all the day’s stories. From the outset I noticed the factional differences, between young and old, national world views, and even ways to spell in English, were seismic. I walked into an argument about the previous day’s front page. ‘Did you notice the American flag was upside down? You let them run the American flag upside down. On the front page. Do you know how that would have looked to the American Government!’ spluttered Jimmy, an American ex-serviceman. ‘Huh? Nope,’ shrugged Gus. The Chinese weren’t too perturbed either. Stuff-ups happened. It was refreshing to look back out at the world through China’s eyes. As news of the Abu Ghraib prisoner scandal continued to break out of Iraq, it was greeted with relish around the conference table. Graphic photographs of American GIs taunting naked Iraqi prisoners were packaged up with stories sermonising about US human-rights violations. The visit of Microsoft chief Bill Gates was treated with a distinct absence of kowtowing. His software might dominate Western computers, but the Chinese Government

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was actively supporting an alternative—the underdog Linux, owned by no one—instead. Censorship and propaganda were handled higher up in the organisation, by people with the right credentials. The editor-in-chief was a member of the Central People’s Political Consultative Congress, after all. Down on the floor, self-censorship and uncertainty reigned. The government drive to stamp out corruption often meant a green light for publicity about embezzlement cases. So when a government auditor-general’s report on fraud was released, listing the State General Administration of Sport as having diverted millions of yuan from an Olympic fund to build apartments, reporters jumped on the angle with glee. The international media picked up the story, crying Olympic corruption. The next day, we were forced to run a correction. ‘But the story wasn’t wrong!’ protested a Foreign Expert. ‘It would have been front-page news in Sydney in the lead-up to the 2000 Games,’ I offered. ‘It doesn’t matter. This is China. The Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games is embarrassed,’ came the reply. We had to swallow the sport administration’s excuse. I learnt not to write ‘bad news’ headlines, because they simply wouldn’t get through. We were showing China’s best face to the world. Sooner than I had expected, I was asked to polish and proofread the main China Daily editorial. This was not an area where stuff-ups could happen. An attack on George Bush and Taiwan, amid a tense time of escalating rhetoric over the Taiwan Strait, appeared

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on my computer screen. I had noticed strange things happening in the wake of the Taiwan elections that returned the independence-leaning Chen Shui-bian to power across the water. Earlier that week, the regular morning TV chatshow host had disappeared, to be replaced by a new face and an hour on the special topic of ‘Taiwan’s Separatist Stance and its Consequences’. A wave of condemnation of Chen was coursing through the official media, even Teens, to coincide with the Taiwanese ‘president’s’ inauguration. In front of me was more strident Taiwan bashing. The US president was criticised for signing a document that would assist a Taiwanese attempt to gain World Health Organisation membership. I bravely tweaked and polished sentences that verged on red slogans, but didn’t go anywhere near the last line: ‘It is not impossible that the United States may face greater danger over Taiwan as a result’. It was a veiled threat in a game of nuance. Who was I to interfere?

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I drifted along Sanlitun Lu to the sound of a cicada chorus. Little yellow flower blossoms fell from the sky and stuck in the grooves of the pavement. Bicycle carts passed by slowly carrying heavy loads of bottled water. I didn’t notice the green uniforms of the omnipresent PLA any more. They melded into the trees. I noticed the ringing of bells on bicycles, the lunchtime chatter in French, German, Russian and Spanish from outdoor cafes. Silver birds with long blue tails darting across the road. I watched parents pick up children from the international school, then eat at Le Petit Paris where the tables had red-checked cloths and the tuna salad came with quail eggs. I passed the faded pink UNICEF building, the heart of global compassion. I was heading north for a meeting with one of the more influential men in town. Past the Spanish and Algerian embassies where the guards stood frozen. Eyes straight 224

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ahead, then sweeping slowly to the left before flicking quickly to the right. I pushed on, through the dangling plastic flyscreen that hung above the Friendship Supermarket’s door. Up the threadbare red-carpeted stairs. I was making a beeline for Toby the tailor’s. Bolts of silk, brocade, wool and linen stretched from one end of the fabric store to the other. It was a sight to light up a girl’s face. The imagination went wild. Toby was a chic magnet. They came from everywhere— French, Italian, Swedish, German, British, African, American. Men and women. He was always calm, despite the hordes demanding his attention. He worked quickly with a measuring tape, listening, scribbling notes and sketches. Always dressed in a white short-sleeved shirt and black trousers, he was the secret behind a large slice of the foreign community’s sartorial splendour. Bespoke fashion was a justifiable indulgence in a land of ill-fitting ready-to-wear. Peony brocade evening dresses, silk dragon skirts, that frayed tweed jacket in the latest imported magazine. Toby could do it all. ‘One week, OK?’ was the promise he repeated. ‘OK, Toby. Tuesday.’ You believed him because you had to. You returned, and if your clothes were in fact there, queued for two small timber change rooms the size of broom closets. You’d be waiting behind businessmen in pinstriped trousers, teenage girls in sexy prom qipaos, willowy Europeans in their own avant-garde designs, embassy ladies in pearls, foreign

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correspondents, visiting raconteurs and art dealers. All barefoot and equal before Toby’s mirror. He was infinitely patient with fussy fitting instructions, and often the alterations seemed never ending. ‘Toby, it is too long here.’ ‘Toby, I want an extra centimetre there.’ But it was the plaintive cries from the laowai that exposed who wielded the real power here. The English woman in immediate need of a cocktail outfit: ‘Pengyou, pengyou, pengyou, pleeease! I’m going to get down on my knees. I have to wear it tonight.’ Toby’s staff remained calm under fire, which wasn’t uncommon. The American businesswoman whose patience was wearing thinner than gauzy cotton: ‘So when is it that these shirts are allegedly going to be ready? I leave the country on Friday.’ The embassy wife who’d dropped by after a long lunch at the Riverside Cafe: ‘You promised me they would be here today. Now you say 8 p.m.?’ In the end, everyone was prepared to wait—they had to, if they wanted to share Toby’s services. ‘He is good. That’s why everyone comes here,’ confided the American over her shoulder to a shocked newcomer surveying the frenzied scene at the top of the stairs. Picking up an armful of perfectly sized Toby skirts and shirts, I reflected that some Beijing shopping habits were going to be very hard to break. •

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Sky called, wanting to know if I could come and speak to one of her classes. The language school was finding native speakers temporarily thin on the ground. ‘We need good accents. Just this once,’ she said. At least someone appreciated Strine. The following Wednesday she picked me up at the front gate and we headed to the university district of Haidian. We met Yu Jia in the university canteen and they piled my plate with handmade noodles and fruit. Yu Jia said I would be the guest act for a class of a dozen advanced students who needed help listening and conversing. We got to class early and I sat on a desk coaxing small talk from a physics student who was due to leave for London to study for a PhD, a couple enrolled in fashion design, and a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl in uniform who was light years ahead of her classmates. The teacher, a twenty-five-year-old American called Dave, arrived wearing oversized baggy jeans that were falling off his hips. I settled in to watch with interest. Yu Jia whispered that Dave was new. He didn’t seem to have a lesson plan, although his students had textbooks on their desks. As they began to read, Dave declared the text was ‘too British’, and told everyone to shut their books if they wanted to learn the sort of English people really used. He took a piece of chalk and wrote the letters ‘C U’ on the blackboard. ‘People don’t say goodbye. They say ‘see you’, and this is how you spell it. Like on mobiles. Easy.’ The thirteen year old frowned, then giggled. I wondered how helpful this would be for the physics student in Oxford.

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‘C U,’ the class repeated, scribbling it down in exercise books. ‘Gr8t,’ Dave wrote on the board. ‘And we don’t go to university—that is such a long word. What a mouthful! No one uses it. Instead, we go to college.’ When Dave had finished the vocabulary lesson, he asked me to come to the front of the room. ‘We have a guest today, and she is going to talk about who she is and what she does. You can ask her some questions.’ I introduced myself and, speaking slowly, told the class I came from Sydney, Australia, where I worked as a journalist. Sky and Yu Jia looked at one another. What did the look mean? They knew I worked at China Daily, so surely they realised there was a high likelihood I was also a foreign journalist? We hadn’t ever really talked about my work. As a topic, work was boring. When we hung out it was to have fun, not bitch about office politics, or any kind of politics for that matter. Sky told me later she had just assumed ‘Foreign Expert’ and hadn’t thought much further about it. Why did ‘foreign journalist’, without fail, bring out the red flashing lights? I had detected a clue watching CCTV the previous week. The talk show was devoted to the topic ‘Why foreign media only find bad things to say about China’. ‘They just want negative stories,’ revealed the guest, a former governmentappointed new assistant to a Western bureau. Long after China had sensibly relaxed the segregation and suspicion of foreign devils in general, the government

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continued to pump out the message that foreign media spies had it in for the national good. Foreign journalists sought chaos to undermine Chinese order. I thought it was a bunker mentality that had persisted well beyond its use-by date. The students asked me if I had travelled in China, and had I been to their home province? Dave was interested in Tibet. ‘What I really want to see is Xinjiang, but they won’t let me,’ he blurted. His students looked up with interest. Xinjiang was the Muslim-dominated province bordering Afghanistan, which had recently become trickier to access because of Chinese paranoia about terrorism. Dave quickly changed the topic. He knew better than to talk about such things in the classroom if he wanted to keep his job. As I left, twenty offers to be my ‘language partner’ followed me out the door. • The Shaolin Temple monks were in town and performing at a Haidian theatre. On one of my rostered nights off, Sky and I went to see the show. The temple, in Henan province, was the birthplace of martial arts in China, and I had fond memories of visiting two years earlier. For kilometres before you arrived at the foot of Song Mountain, the hills were alive with the soft sound of a thousand somersaulting young ninjas thwacking bamboo staffs and swords. Tracksuited, grinning teenagers trained all day in small troupes in the open fields around Shaolin with dreams of movie stardom, like their hero Jet Li. The temple, and Li, had shot to international fame in the 1980s in a wushu, or kung fu movie, that drew on the

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ancient legend of the monks’ special brand of fighting based on moves studied from animal poses. The indents in the temple floor bore witness to their daily practice over centuries. These days, the monks were international entertainers who toured the world in bright orange robes with a slick stage show. Shaolin village had swollen with copycat wushu academies cashing in on the temple’s name. Loudspeakers erected on rooftops announced the time on the hour, as troupes moved between practice grounds. They marched through the main street, pouring around corners and singing as the lead student held a broom in the air as flag bearer. Teenage boys and girls spent their days leaping, hurtling, kicking. It was about skill, flexibility and balance. It took great skill to get it right, so there were inevitably casualties. Sparring partners accompanied one another to the village medical clinic, coming back bandaged or pulling a large herbal drip on wheels, because they were taught they had to take responsibility for their actions. I’d been bewitched by the clear running streams, croaking frogs and unlikely harmony. But I had to turn down an approach within the hallowed temple grounds by a coach with the business card ‘Shaolin Temple Chief Instructor’. Sitting in his office—a spartan room with a water cooler, dumbbells and bunk bed—he outlined that the minimum period for gruelling dawn-to-dusk training of a new recruit was three months. Sadly, I only had a week. In the taxi on the way to the theatre, Sky announced that she had finally made a ‘good choice’ for my Chinese name.

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I had been secretly mulling over ‘Qing Ling’, inspired by the bride of Dr Sun Yat-sen, regarded in China as the father of the first republic. I’d spent an afternoon wandering around her vast former residence, now a museum on the shores of Houhai that extolled her feminist credentials. Born in old Shanghai to wealthy parents, Song Qing Ling had been educated at a Christian ladies college in the United States. Her school essays on display were flawless. But Song Qing Ling was soon swept up by revolutionary ideals, and revulsion at how the Chinese were treated by foreigners in their own land. She gave up the good life to marry Dr Sun Yat-sen, a nationalist who was briefly the first president of China’s first republic, ending centuries of dynastic rule in 1912. After the republic imploded, and Dr Sun Yat-sen’s premature death in 1925, Qing Ling carried on his work. She assisted the communists, travelling to Russia to raise funds for medical aid for Mao’s army, and ended up vice-chairman of the People’s Republic in Beijing. Interestingly, her sister Mei Ling was married to the leader of the Kuomintang party, Chiang Kai-shek, who later became Red China’s number one bitter foe. Chiang fled to Taiwan with two million others and his wife, better known as Madam Chiang Kai-shek, in 1949. There, they declared their own Chinese republic. The Taiwan Strait crisis that ensued would have put a permanent stop to regular Song family gatherings. On reflection, taking Qing Ling as a name, no matter what her chick cred, would probably have been a minefield. ‘Hai Yun,’ Sky offered. It translated as sea cloud.

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I knew straightaway I had finally found—even better, had been given—my Chinese name. ‘Hai Yun,’ I agreed. The theatre was packed with students and families. While the Chinese crowd watched in fascinated silence—when they weren’t talking on mobile phones or chatting—I gasped with the action and threw my hands to my face as the young monks contorted limbs and threw themselves on a bed of nails. ‘What’s wrong? Are you sick?’ said Sky, concerned. ‘Of course not,’ I assured her. ‘I’m having fun.’ • A sink full of ice and beer, wine in the fridge, and a table laid out with chips and dips. It was all so familiar, yet in Beijing, immediately strange. Seamus, an Irish Foreign Expert in his fifties, had decided to celebrate his first monthly pay envelope by playing host at his apartment. It was a house party, and he conscientiously invited equal numbers of Chinese and foreign guests, from far and wide. People stood around chatting in the kitchen and the lounge room with plastic cups in hand. Seamus brought out his special purchase for the evening—Jim Beam, sourced at great cost, to put the party in full swing. He offered the bottle around, but most people stuck with beer in the heat; the girls moved to soft drink after wine. I decided to road-test my new name. ‘Hai Yun. Is there a danger it could sound like “sea cargo” if I get my tones wrong? What do you think?’ I asked one of the girls from the advertising department.

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‘No chance. It’s a good name,’ she said. Connections with the advertising department were highly sought among Foreign Experts because they paid good money to have someone disentangle the Chinglish in ads. In years gone by, Chinese companies hadn’t worried so much about the mistakes, but now they realised it made foreigners, and foreign companies, laugh. For Seamus, proofreading ads was quickly becoming a profitable sideline. I refilled my glass from the fridge, squeezing past Zhi Mei who was in deep conversation with Jimmy as to why Joe wasn’t likely to marry his latest girlfriend, despite her high hopes. I joined a group of Chinese nurses in the lounge room, talking with a meticulously attired elderly man. When I said I was from Sydney, talk turned to the Olympics. ‘It is my fear that no one will come to the Beijing Olympics. The tourists will stay home,’ said the man, who had been a Chinese Government official in the Foreign Ministry before his retirement. ‘I can’t believe that would happen,’ I said. ‘The Taiwan problem will rear its head at exactly the wrong moment. At the eleventh hour, in a move designed for maximum effect. China will not tolerate such a move, and as a consequence the world will shun China.’ The nurses were silent, but listening. ‘I know Taiwan is a problem. But would China seriously risk so much amazing economic development, and the opportunity of the Olympics, over Taiwan?’ I asked. The old man’s words were sobering. On the issue of North Korea, which had walked out of nuclear disarmament

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talks with the United States and China the previous week, he was even more pessimistic. ‘North Korea is a rogue state that doesn’t even return trains when you send them grain for aid. They steal the carriages because they are desperate. They claim they are only doing what Mao told them to do by building nuclear weapons. It is deceitful. I don’t like the way the government kowtows to the regime. No good will come of it,’ he said. A young doctor held a different view. ‘North Korea is the last place for communism. The last place for our ideology.’ The doctor had studied in the United States, but said that most of his friends at college were from Poland and Germany. ‘People from the old Eastern bloc have things in common. They can understand China. Westerners just don’t know and think it is all bad. I have friends in North Korea and South Korea. I don’t believe they want to be reunited; they think too differently. People in the North have had a similar education to what ours was in the past. It becomes a part of you, and shapes how you think. Even when things are changing.’ He was in his thirties and said China needed to stick up for its ideological soul mate on the Korean peninsula. ‘The United States is the richest country on earth and yet it doesn’t provide healthcare for its people,’ he continued. ‘And the media! The television news is unbelievable. They say China’s media is propaganda, but so is American TV. Have you ever seen Fox News? It’s just a different kind of propaganda.’

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The old man, with a longer perspective on these things, said China Daily had evolved from the days when it merely reprinted People’s Daily propaganda into English. ‘It is readable now,’ he said. ‘China is changing. Maybe it doesn’t have so much in common with North Korea now?’ I asked the doctor. ‘Yes, it is changing and it is becoming more unfair. Some people are so rich now, and I have nothing, for example.’ He wasn’t seriously crying poor, because he had enjoyed an overseas education, but he gave me some examples from his circle of friends. ‘In the village where I grew up, my friend left school to become a truck driver. When I returned to China after finishing studying, he was living in a luxury apartment in Shanghai.’ ‘He must be clever,’ I said. ‘He is not clever, but he has connections. He bought a factory that was losing money and had to be shut down. He didn’t have any money, but he spoke to someone he knew in the mayor’s office. They said, “Don’t worry, we will make sure no one else bids for it.” They also arranged with the bank to extend him a loan. He turned the factory around, and then went on and bought more factories. It is about connections and corruption.’ Another of the doctor’s friends lived in an old brick apartment block in Sanlitun that was scheduled to be knocked down. Property developers planned to bulldoze the neighbourhood to build a glitzy shopping mall. ‘The compensation money is enough to buy an apartment, but nowhere near Sanlitun. He will have to go a long way

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out, move away from central Beijing. He will be left with much less than he had. The property developer will have more.’ I asked him if he thought most young Chinese would agree that things were becoming unfair. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They just shop. I can’t talk to anyone under twenty-five. I don’t understand them.’ It was getting late by now, and Seamus loaded a music compilation into the DVD player. Drawn by the loud beat, Alex, Steve and Ben dropped by from down the corridor. They were on their way to Sanlitun to watch late-night soccer via satellite. I don’t recall how long after the music began to play that Jimi Hendrix came on. I just remember slowly becoming aware of a loud sobbing. I looked around to see Seamus sitting in his armchair opposite the TV with a remote control in one hand and an empty bottle of Jim Beam in the other. He was clad in a black T-shirt and jeans and was crying to Hendrix’s rendition of ‘All Along the Watchtower’. The nurses and advertising girls stood watching the crumpled figure in horror. ‘Is he OK?’ asked one of them quietly. ‘Oh. It’s just something foreigners do from time to time, usually involving alcohol,’ I said. But the nurses weren’t buying it. Jimmy pitched in, ‘Westerners can get very emotional over music. This is just so rock’n’roll! Isn’t there a favourite song y’all have that just takes you back?’ I would have sung along, to save Seamus some face, but I didn’t know the words.

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Jimmy took the remote control from Seamus’s hand and skipped to another track. Seamus’s head tipped forlornly forward. The Jim Beam bottle fell to the ground with a clunk. The Chinese guests didn’t know where to look. They gingerly filed out of the room, one by one, leaving their cups and beer bottles neatly stacked on the kitchen table. The outburst of raw emotion had been a conversation killer. The party was over. • Seamus recovered from a killer hangover in time to turn up for the night shift. Our Chinese colleagues said nothing about the previous evening’s display. We sat quietly at the polishing desk, working up funny lines for the China Scene page, where the stories were real but sometimes needed a kick along. ‘Donated sperm not up to the job: eighty per cent of sperm donated by 1500 men to a local hospital in Hunan province failed to qualify, the New Daily of the East reports.’ I found it hard to snicker. I was disturbed by the party incident. Apart from my concern for Seamus, and wondering why he had come to China, I also couldn’t help feeling that the party had somehow reinforced the strange laowai typecast we were all trying to shake. I remembered a discussion in my Chinese class one day. ‘Is it acceptable for a man to cry in Australia?’ our laoshi asked. ‘Sometimes,’ our class had decided, citing the examples of sportsmen and the occasional prime minister. ‘Chinese men don’t cry,’ she replied. But that night’s loss of face was nothing compared to what lay in store for me.

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I invited Sky, Mei Lin, Wen Long and William to dinner at the China Daily restaurant. In retrospect, a bad move from the start. I should have opted for somewhere outside the compound gates, where the entrepreneurial spirit thrived to keep standards high. But my first lunch with the Foreign Affairs team had been impressive, and it somehow seemed a step closer to inviting them to eat at my home, which didn’t even have a dining table and chairs, let alone the kitchen equipment I’d need. Upstairs in the restaurant, we were shown to a private room. I was dismayed to notice the pink tablecloth was dirty and looked as though it hadn’t even been scraped clean from the previous meal. A young waitress in plaits arrived and handed around menus. Mei Lin took input from everyone before deciding on a list of dishes that would comprise a meal balanced in hot and cold, meat and vegetables. As she started to order, the waitress abruptly announced that the chef had forgotten to go to the markets that morning and there were no fresh vegetables or fruit. This wiped out half of the menu. Wen Long raised his eyebrows at his wife. They were both deeply health conscious and wouldn’t dream of eating meat alone. Mei Lin ran down the menu again with the waitress, who didn’t think to offer an apology, until she had found enough to make a passable meal. We ordered two large bottles of beer and a tetra-pak of milk to drink. My embarrassment crept as dishes turned up cold, late and missing key ingredients. It turned to absolute horror when it came time to pay.

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I slipped out of the room to settle the bill at the front counter. It was the Chinese custom to pay if you had extended the invitation to dine. The total came to a hundred and thirty-nine yuan, about twenty-five dollars. I still had a hundred and thirty-two yuan on my China Daily dining card. As I was unlikely to use it up before I left Beijing, I asked the cashier if I could pay by card, and settle the extra in cash. The cashier asked the restaurant manager, who came out of the kitchen to tell me this was fine. It would involve some extra paperwork on his part because of the unique China Daily accounting system, but as I couldn’t add any money to my card until Tuesday, he agreed it made sense. The manager took my card and swiped it through the register. I handed over seven yuan. Noticing my extended absence, Sky and the others wandered out from the private room. The waitress with plaits scurried after them. As we stood chatting, the waitress grabbed the bill from behind the counter, which was now unattended, and started waving it in the air. She had detected errant foreign behaviour, and saw I was about to head out the door. The main dining room was quite full, and as the waitress started screaming, at least a dozen people looked up. ‘I have already settled this,’ I told her in Chinese, looking around for the manager. He was nowhere to be seen. I showed her the receipt, but she continued screaming about seven yuan. Wen Long reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet after the waitress turned to him with the bill.

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‘No, no,’ I pleaded with her. ‘These are my guests. I’ve already paid and spoken to your manager.’ I had noticed several newspaper editors and their guests in the dining room. I wanted to curl up and die. Jing Yi spotted me, and stood up to come to my rescue. ‘She says that you are not allowed to pay by card and cash. It must be all one, or all the other,’ she said. ‘I know, but the manager has OK’d it,’ I said pathetically. ‘These rules are important,’ she insisted. I still couldn’t see what the big deal was. And I didn’t understand how this teenage waitress—pointing her finger at me and loudly screaming—could get away with completely humiliating customers. Hadn’t the concept of customer service reached state-owned enterprises? Jing Yi swiped her own card through the register to settle the matter quickly and shut the waitress up. The seven yuan had now been paid twice. The manager reappeared from the kitchen. I turned to him for backup, to salvage any remaining scrap of face. He told the waitress that I had indeed paid in full, and sent her to the kitchen to wash dishes with a few sharp words. I thanked Jing Yi profusely for her help, but couldn’t get out of that restaurant quickly enough. Walking back to the car, Wen Long told me incidents like this had happened all the time in old-style Chinese companies. The rules ruled. How could anyone possibly live with such petty officiousness? I knew I would never be able to step foot inside that restaurant, or the canteen, again. ‘Bring on the new China,’ I sighed.

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• When it came my turn to leave China Daily, the next one out of the Big Brother house, the Foreign Affairs Office sent word that I was to meet them for my farewell lunch. I arrived early to settle the apartment gas and water bills with Zhou Mi. She was already in the office preparing a receipt for me, without even being asked this time. Everyone was animated and chatty. Small Chen was in a particularly happy mood. He let slip that the director had commented that my performance on the China Daily polishing desk had been ‘perfect’. This was a surprise, given the drama and apprehension that had surrounded my getting there. Old Chen joined us from his private office next door. ‘Would you like me to arrange for the company driver to collect your bags tomorrow, to take you to the airport?’ Old Chen offered warmly. ‘Thank you, but it’s not necessary,’ I said. ‘I won’t be leaving Beijing right away. I am flying to Anhui for a week, and will move my things to a friend’s place before then.’ I was leaving my bags at Allison’s. Old Chen looked worried. ‘When are you leaving China?’ he asked pointedly. ‘She is going to Huang Shan for a vacation,’ said Zhou Mi, jumping in to vouch for my story. We had talked about the possibilities for a holiday at length during her many visits to my apartment. I needed another taste of the China that lay beyond the compound gates. Shanghai would be too hot at this time of year, Zhou Mi had counselled. Harbin, in the north, was unexciting

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without the snow and ice. My landlady suggested Guilin, China’s Number One Water and Mountain Scenic Spot. ‘Been there,’ I told her. I was tossing up between Guizhou, an impoverished province rich in ethnic minorities and cushion covers, and Huang Shan, the yellow mountain. Zhou Mi said I should go to Huang Shan. ‘That’s where the Chinese go,’ she said. I assured Old Chen I would be leaving Beijing within days of my return from Anhui, and had a seat booked back to Australia. That seemed to pacify him. ‘We should go to lunch,’ he said. ‘Over lunch, you can let us know of any criticisms you may have.’ It was such a China Daily thing to say. I had been expecting and dreading the canteen again, but instead, Foreign Affairs had booked a private room in a new restaurant down the road. Ting Ting, Susan and Small Chen went over the top in ordering a full table of dishes, with a fat Peking duck to arrive at the end of the meal. Life in China was living up to the textbook. ‘Ting Ting will be travelling overseas soon also. She has won a Party-sponsored scholarship to train at a university in Hawaii,’ said Old Chen. Ting Ting beamed across the table. ‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘That’s fantastic.’ ‘I’ll be there for nine months. I’m looking forward to the weather,’ Ting Ting said. ‘China Daily mostly hires young graduates, straight out of university and with no journalism training. They work a few years, and then the Party selects the best to send overseas for study. Ting Ting is very lucky,’ said Old Chen.

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He complained that it was difficult to attract foreigners to work at China Daily. ‘We will be bidding for the licence to operate the daily newspaper for the Beijing Olympics. If we win, we will need many more Foreign Experts. Ting Ting put an advertisement on the internet last year, but we only received three replies, and then they fell through. In the past we have found some foreigners cheat on the email test we give them to assess their ability. They score highly in the test, but when they arrive, the standard of their work is poor,’ he said, looking puzzled. ‘Perhaps you need to hire more foreign journalists,’ I suggested. ‘How did you find your time here?’ he asked, fishing for criticisms. ‘I enjoyed it a lot,’ I said, refusing to bite. ‘You have talented young reporters.’ We talked about how China was changing, and what this meant for companies like China Daily. Next year its government funding would shrink. The new era was rushing in, and it was uncomfortable. I knew the transition would be made all the more difficult by the government’s intention to cut off the purse strings while still keeping ultimate power over what the paper wrote. How could you privatise the advertising and sales department, without similarly letting the newsroom stand on its own feet, to report without fear or favour? It would be like liberalising the economy without giving people other freedoms. I thought it, but didn’t say it. It was not a constructive criticism.

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‘If you want to come back, we would be happy to have you,’ said Old Chen. He paused before adding, ‘Next time, let’s not involve the embassy.’ He handed me a small gift. I unwrapped it to find a black and white coffee mug printed with a China Daily front page from 1998. ‘ZHOU, DENG STILL IN PEOPLE’S HEARTS’, the headline screamed. Below it, the story told of ‘various activities to commemorate two of China’s greatest leaders, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping’. The main photograph was of an elderly Israel Epstein, the Foreign Expert to beat all Foreign Experts. Epstein was pointing to a photograph of himself seated next to the late premier Zhou. The mug was a special souvenir, and I knew it would evoke strong memories of my Foreign Expert life. I finished work late that night, and it was past 9 p.m. by the time I joined Chloe, Ralph, Alex and Ben eating lamb skewers at a table outside the noodle shop. They were setting off on a weekend camping trip to the Great Wall the next morning, despite a weather forecast that the heat would break into a drenching storm. I piked, fearing flu or food poisoning might ruin my tightly scheduled holiday plans. Alex was leaving China the following Wednesday. He had a final semester of university to finish and was growing anxious about finding a ‘real’ job as he read a string of emails from old classmates graduating ahead of him and landing gigs with British papers. Chloe wasn’t looking forward to going back to Canada, but knew that she had to. Ben still didn’t know what he wanted to do with his real life in the real world, so would stick with Beijing in

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the meantime. I was due at the Herald in a fortnight, although right now I couldn’t imagine it. Sydney seemed a strange and distant planet. The entire neighbourhood was out on the streets, walking dogs or knocking back baijiu in small groups around tables. Old ladies in gold jewellery and silk shirts competed in jumping out from behind chairs the minute someone emptied their beer or soft-drink bottle. They were collecting for recycling and had established beats around the alfresco diners. A full yellow moon hung in the sky. Although I had enjoyed my time at China Daily, I was not sad to be leaving. Foreign Expert life was too limited for this Western journalist. I met Sky and Yu Jia for another farewell lunch the next day. Sky presented me with a miniature teapot set from Hunan province. She took command of the menu, filling the table with Beijing specialties, chamomile wholeflower tea and a large Peking duck. I would miss Sky’s warm spiritedness. She had so generously, and without question, welcomed me into her Beijing life. We pulled faces posing for photographs and promised to keep in touch. That afternoon, as I struggled with my bags down to the waiting taxi I had hailed from the street, the lift lady came to my rescue. She packed me into the cab and waved goodbye energetically. Upstairs, I had left behind mementoes of my stay, little additions to the haowanr collection of assorted odd things Zhou Mi had preserved from past tenants in the spare room. A turquoise bangle I had bought from a Tibetan girl that had cracked when I dropped it on the tiled floor, but wasn’t that badly damaged; singlet tops that were too short

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and never worn by a tall laowai with curves; an assortment of soft pillows; my black cloth shoes. Maybe someone could use them. It seemed too wasteful to throw them out just because they weren’t new, although a few months ago this is exactly what I would have done. My bicycle was parked outside, lost among the mass of other silver bicycles.

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Crouched in the dark on the edge of a mountain, I had an uninterrupted line of sight to where the horizon would soon appear. I tightened my grip on a small, twisted tree growing precariously out of the rock, and sat as still as I possibly could. The clouds were below, not above, at this height. There was no safety barricade to break a fall. And a crowd of over a hundred had gathered behind me in silent, reverent anticipation of day break. We had spent the night on Huang Shan, strangers variously sleeping in the dorms and hotels that were corralled onto its small plateau, after a day of roaming craggy peaks. Each bend in the trail, each shift of the perpetual mist, had revealed another breathtaking sight as gnarled pines clung to stone, and seventy-two summits stretched into the distance. It was like being let loose to play in the gods’ giant bonsai garden. At dusk, officers from the mountain-top police station and hotel workers had wound down with a basketball match. But to rise early and witness the new day dawn 247

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across the northern ‘cloud sea’ was the main game. Zhou Mi had instructed me not to miss it. I was supposed to be Hai Yun, after all. Cocooned in an oversized down jacket, I had crept from the hotel through the black, final hour of night to secure my position. I was surprised to find I was the first one to reach the cliff top. ‘Laowai!’ cried the next person, the fastest of a band of university students scrambling to the edge, when he saw me there. ‘Beijing ren!’ I replied, elbows ready. ‘Ahhh. Ha ha.’ Defeat conceded, he had settled on a nearby rock and grabbed his own tree. A collective gasp rose with the small pink sun, a toy ball floating on an ocean of mist and clouds. Mountains appeared as islands. The sight was duly recorded on a hundred cameras and mobile phones, and then the crowd slowly dispersed. It was time to start the descent. The porters padding up and down the seven-kilometre rocky staircase from sunrise to sunset made it look effortless. They wore simple cloth shoes with thin rubber soles and were bare-chested under their numbered yellow vests. But from the wooden poles balanced across their shoulders swung heavy burdens: crates of rice, watermelons, unbroken eggs, linen, pot plants and stinking garbage. Although a cable car ran up the mountain, easily transporting more tourists than walked, everything the hotels at the summit required was carried up on foot. Human labour was still cheaper than machines.

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Middle-aged and nouveau middle-class tourists in leather shoes, slacks and sweat-inducing polyester puffed red in the face and clutched plastic bags stuffed with snacks and water as they battled up, or down, the path. Most were happy for the moment’s rest as they stood aside for the porters. You wouldn’t try to stop a juggernaut. I was equipped with one of the wooden walking poles issued at both ends of the staircase, pistachio nuts and a bottle of water that had been extortionately priced. Traffic on the steps was early morning rush hour, but didn’t detract from the spectacular view. Bony stone fingers reached up into the sky. Halfway, a large billboard of Deng Xiaoping with rolled-up trousers and a walking stick just like mine noted that the great Party leader had historically stopped right there to catch his breath. I reached the bottom before lunchtime. At Cloud Valley, a short walk from the lower cable-car station, I found a sprawling and faded Huizhou-style villa. It was surrounded by towering pines that shot up from the valley floor. With no need to be anywhere else in a hurry, I decided to stay. Red silk lanterns hung above the hotel’s dark timber entrance. Midweek, in the hot and humid season, there were few other guests because most visitors to Huang Shan went up, not down. Cloud Valley was a place of complete privacy, even isolation, after three months of feeling I was never alone. It was what I needed, or so I thought. I surrendered my passport at check-in and the staff soon forgot I was there. Completely forgot. ‘Aiya! Sorry. Wait thirty minutes, we’ll fire up the boiler,’ said the woman at reception when I reminded her the hot water was off.

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I was filthy, with frozen calf muscles, and in need of a shower. An hour later the pipes creaked and groaned into action when, on second attempt, I spun the tap marked with the obvious blue ‘C’ for hot. Scrubbed clean, I flopped down on the bed and watched re-runs of Jackie Chan movies that pre-dated his Hollywood stardom. Then came the fantastical silk-costumed soaps set in imperial times, when everyone knew alchemy, magic and had long flowing hair. The TV schedule switched to more modern drama, where husbands cheated on wives, elderly parents were disappointed with their adult children’s prospects, ‘little emperors’ were spoilt and fat, and traditional filial piety was in crisis. A news bulletin reported an outbreak of bird flu in Anhui. I turned off the box. I listened to the stream bubbling outside the open window. Crystal water swirled over smooth rocks, eddied and rushed past lush green banks. The sound was serene. There was no other noise. Light flooded into the room. I noticed the carpet, once a plush apricot, was water-stained, and damp had crept up the papered walls. The room was dank faded glory. I closed my eyes, breathing in mould spores, and felt the sun on my face. There was nothing else to do until dinner. I would sit here, still, for as long as I could. I tried to make sense of what my season in red, my charade as a Beijing worker, had meant. What had it achieved? Twenty minutes seemed an eternity, and it brought no answers, just a vague sense that whatever China was to become, it was determined to find its own way there. I had arrived in Beijing seeking the shape of things to come. I

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had instead slowly learnt of the daily complexities of the journey. I fished through my backpack for the least smelly socks, eased shoes back on to tender feet and set off. I picked up a path that ran through the woods behind the villa, following the river down the valley with the promise of a waterfall. I scrambled over lichen-covered rocks and pushed into the trees. After five or ten minutes the pines gave way to thick bamboo. Whichever direction I looked, green poles formed a deep, fluorescent screen. The bamboo creaked as the grove swayed, long cylindrical trunks bowing slowly in the breeze. I began to walk faster. Another forty-five minutes passed and there was no sign of the waterfall or the end of the path. There were no other travellers, no villagers, no goats, no monkeys, no birds, no flies. Just me, alone, walking further and further into the bamboo. No sound but the bamboo’s song. I should have been revelling in my privacy in such a magnificent forest. But instead I just felt spooked. I was too alone. I spun around and started running back the other way, stumbling through the green. This wasn’t how Zhang Yimou would have scripted it—his heroines danced through the bamboo canopy. I was a wimp who had somehow become accustomed to the reassuring presence of others, everywhere, in a city of 14.9 million. A city where, despite the crowd, everyone had learnt to mostly get along. Where was the lift lady? I made it back to the villa as the light began to fade behind Huang Shan and a chill crept into the air. At dinner,

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I was glad of the company of the waitresses in the elaborately carved timber dining room. The next morning I checked out and caught the local bus from Tangkou, the village at the foot of the mountain, to the brighter lights of Tunxi, which had the closest airport. The two-hour trip took half the day by the time the driver had waited at the town’s stone bridge for twelve passengers, and not one less, to fill his seats before departing. Four pairs of eyes scanned the dusty main road, pleadingly, for anyone else to come along. Then it was six, then seven. A rush after lunch as restaurants emptied brought numbers to eleven. We thought we had settled it with a whip-around of another yuan a head to buy out the empty seat, but the driver still slowed down and called out hopefully to every pedestrian we passed on the highway, until a woman finally climbed aboard, completing his dozen. It rained so much in Tunxi that the bicycles came cleverly equipped with umbrella stands permanently fixed between the handlebars. The town lay on the confluence of two broad, slow-moving rivers, and a visitor could theoretically spend hours walking through the preserved street of Song dynasty timber terraces that stretched parallel to the water, a jumble of herbal medicine, antique and art stores. If you could stand the crushing humidity that built before each downpour, and managed to venture beyond the airconditioned hotel foyer, that is. I now understood why a Chinese colleague had dismissed my comment that Beijing was humid in the summer. ‘Beijing isn’t humid. China’s south is humid.’

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It was in the hotel foyer that I met my latest and smallest Chinese friend. She had grabbed my free hand as I was filling in a registration card at the front desk. I looked down to see a girl, no older than twelve, beaming up at me. She was neatly dressed in a red-checked blouse and chinos, her hair cut into a bob. She shook my hand and introduced herself as Wei Wei, holidaying with her mother, father and younger brother. She had excellent English, and wanted to take the opportunity to practise. Wei Wei was particularly excited to learn I was a Foreign Expert from Beijing. ‘I work at China Daily,’ I told her, pointing to the folded copy of the previous day’s newspaper she had tucked under her arm. ‘My teacher brings China Daily to class, but I often find the politics too much. It’s difficult. I prefer 21st Century,’ she said confidently. ‘Well, perhaps you have read some of my columns in 21st Century? I worked there recently too. There was one about students who cheat in exams, and one about foreigners and driving tests.’ ‘My class reads 21st Century every week! It’s my window on the world,’ said Wei Wei. Hearing this delighted me right down to my cynical Foreign Expert core. Wei Wei had given the printed word a connection to something real in China. If a newspaper had helped a young girl read in English, and she felt it had opened her world, then this was something meaningful. When I had first encountered China, children were fascinated with foreigners and strangers took my photograph. I

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represented the unknown outside. Even in 2002 I had drawn a crowd in a rural village just by striking up a conversation. ‘Laowai speaks Chinese!’ ‘Did she fly on a plane?’ ‘How far is Australia?’ But China had rapidly become more worldly. People on the street these days knew their place in the global order, and it was a central one. The national confidence stemmed from almost 5000 years of civilisation that predated the last tumultuous five decades. Wei Wei was eager to spend some time with a laowai to practise her English, but she was sure of herself and her own knowledge. Wei Wei and I met up repeatedly in the foyer, or by the empty pool, and linked arms as we walked and talked. She had big aspirations for her, and China’s, bright future. ‘I will certainly finish middle-school and go on to university,’ she said. ‘I’ll probably study business, I think.’ Her father was a businessman. She said the family took a holiday like this one every year, driving their car to see the sights. Wei Wei recommended that if I had already been to Huang Shan, I should try to visit some of the old rural villages in nearby Yixian. Hongcun, the most famous, had been the setting for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I didn’t need convincing. That Chinese cinematic dream was beckoning. When we said goodbye, Wei Wei offered up her small hand in prim imitation of a well-mannered English gentleman. That afternoon I walked to the other side of the river to track down the town’s China Tourism Service. It was hidden in a room above a small restaurant.

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‘Yes?’ said an old man in thick glasses, eventually looking up from his cubicle. ‘I would like to go to Yixian tomorrow. Is it possible to join a tour?’ He gestured for me to come and sit down at his desk. ‘There is a Chinese tour leaving tomorrow morning but, unfortunately, Yixian is in a closed area. There is an army base nearby, and foreigners cannot travel there without a permit from the Public Security Bureau. I am afraid that for one person travelling alone to arrange this, you would need a private driver and that would be very expensive. Perhaps you would like to see the Firefly Grottoes instead?’ The only time I had previously been confronted with a town closed to foreigners was in Tibet. The PSB in Lhasa had randomly stopped issuing access permits to Shigatse, the seat of the Panchen Lama and Tibet’s second-largest city. I’d sidestepped the problem by jumping on a public bus for a stomach-churning twelve-hour ride across the Tibetan plateau. The bus gradually filled with the smell of tobacco mixed with yak-butter vomit as the nomad girls sent into town to collect sacks of rice for their families discreetly retched into their woollen aprons, while men in black felt hats kept chain-smoking regardless. My laowai hair and big nose were concealed under a scarf. When we arrived at Shigatse’s entrance at nightfall, the army officers stationed there spotted the nose immediately and yelled at the driver. But they were not about to send a bus back into the freezing wilderness. I could stay. In Yixian, however, the restriction was steadfast. A Google search weeks later suggested a mysterious air base

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and something aimed at Taiwan. China still had its secrets then, even in its tourism heartland. I was sick of secrets, sick of suspicion and sick of being told what foreigners couldn’t do. I was determined to join the Chinese tour group. ‘I’m not a tourist. I’m a Foreign Expert,’ I said, handing over my little red book. ‘I have been working for a stateowned enterprise, so surely that means I can travel with a Chinese tour group to Yixian, if I pay for the security permit. Perhaps you can help me arrange it with the PSB?’ ‘The PSB in Tunxi is closed. And the guide will not speak any English,’ he said, throwing up more problems in an attempt to wear me down. But my negotiation skills had been honed in recent months by watching countless Beijing ‘old aunties’ patiently and firmly stand their ground. ‘Mei wenti. That’s no problem. Yixian is one of the most famous tourist sites around. All of the tour brochures in my hotel foyer include it. I don’t understand why, if I have come all the way from Beijing, I can’t go. I just want to see a pretty town.’ The time was ticking towards 4.30 p.m. and the CTS office would soon shut for dinner. I appeared to be in no hurry to go anywhere. The old man relented. If I paid the money for the permit here and now—which doubled the price of the Chinese tour, but was still half the cost of a private driver—I could travel with the group leaving in the morning. ‘I will phone the driver myself tonight and tell him to look after you,’ he promised, suddenly sincere as he wrote

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out a rice-paper receipt and stamped it three times with red ink. ‘He will take you to the PSB in the morning. You must have your passport and visa ready. Without a permit, you cannot enter the town.’ The next morning, the minibus sped past impossibly lush green fields and clear running rivers. I studied the scenery for a hint of the military, but didn’t see anything. When we arrived in Xidi, the first of the UNESCO-listed towns on our tour, the driver took me to the PSB. The rest of the group waited. I hoped I wouldn’t ruin their day. What a turnaround for a fiercely independent Western backpacker to be begging to join a flag-waving mob of Chinese tourists. I had finally seen the power of the collective. The driver handed my documents and cash over the counter and submitted a list of the names of the Chinese travellers. For a price, I got my permit. Back in the car park, our group raised a kaleidoscope of umbrellas against the oppressive sun and set off behind a tour guide. It soon became clear that the bother to get here had been worth it. Tripping through maze-like villages set on duck ponds choked with waterlilies, exploring cobbled paths too narrow for a motorbike, and standing under the intricately carved lattice windows of ancestral halls that told a vivid living history, was the closest I had been to the China so frequently romanticised in Australia. The greytiled roofs and white-stone walls could have been conjured up in inky brushstrokes by the art students who bent over easels in the mosaic alleyways, rather than the usual order, where art imitated life.

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Xidi was over nine hundred years old. It had continued to prosper through to the Qing dynasty, before the revolution changed life forever for the merchant classes and feudal clans. The next village, Hongcun, had a water system built according to geomancy principles that ran through every house in the village and collected in the immense Moon Pond at its centre. My group was welcoming and inclusive. We ate lunch together in a village home, and I walked with a Chinese schoolteacher from Fujian. She was twenty-five and travelling across the mainland during the semester break. Another backpacker making it up as she went along, travelling wherever she wanted to go. Throughout the afternoon, I was repeatedly spotted by a guide who was escorting a pair of American women into the same towns. One of the women had been loudly voicing her displeasure at the absence of matriarchal figures in the wall-hangings in the ancestral halls. She seized on it as evidence of rampant sexism in China. I wanted to tell her it wasn’t like that anymore. In all my time at China Daily, I had never detected sexism. ‘How did you get here?’ her guide demanded, finally approaching me as I took a moment to rest from the heat and drink some water. ‘I’m with them,’ I said, gesturing ahead. But my group had disappeared around a corner. ‘You can’t come here on your own,’ said the disbelieving guide, continuing his lecture. He shut up when my group leader re-emerged from behind a whitewashed wall. With a wave, a smile and a

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flag, he beckoned for me to hurry along, like the good shepherd come to rescue his straggling sheep. • I rejoined my bags in Allison’s spare room. With a couple of days to kill before leaving Beijing, I found myself in the grand marble foyer of the Chinese People’s Revolutionary Military Museum. A giant statue of Mao under a red star was surrounded by poinsettias and peace lilies. On the wall a larger-than-life image of Jiang Zemin rode an open-top car past Tiananmen. The air was cool and the vibe churchlike, set to an orchestral rendition of Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Sounds of Silence’. I marched straight ahead into the Hall of Weapons, where fighter planes, tanks, erect missiles and satellites entertained small children. Next door, the Hall of the Agrarian Revolution taught the lessons of the past in oil paintings. Serious young men in Western linen suits and silk ties met one day in August 1927 in a Shanghai room lit with a candelabra. Ladies in long white gowns waved fans to keep them cool amid hot debate. A decade later, the fashion had changed, to straw sandals that chafed marching feet and bandaged legs. Girl soldiers wore bob hairdos, and Mao’s army forded rivers and hiked through snow. Upstairs, in the Monument Room, the history lesson continued with bronze busts: Karl Marx, Lenin, Sun Yatsen, Mao and the Model Soldier Lei Feng. Some of the names under other busts had been erased; they were faces I didn’t recognise. Notable foreigners were acknowledged: Genghis Khan, Kim Il Sung and a Japanese family-planning expert. I was stopped in my tracks by the most recent

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additions to the hall. Opposite Genghis stood Zhang Binggui, Outstanding Chinese Salesman. His bust had been cast in 1988, and he wore a tie and Western suit. Was history, like fashion, circular? • I was window-shopping along Dongsi South Street when I came across the crowd blocking the footpath. At its centre was a young woman sitting on a piece of cardboard on the ground. She was dressed in brown cord overalls with a teddy bear on the front pocket, and held a hand-written placard and an old train ticket. A small blue bag and jacket lay beside her. As she sat quietly, the crowd were reading her story. I struggled to pick out all the characters, so asked the woman standing next to me to translate. ‘She is pregnant and came to Beijing to look for work, but no one will employ her. Without a job, how can she afford to have the baby? She is from Guangdong, and doesn’t have a Beijing residence card. She is living on the street.’ The sight of the girl, who had a soft face and delicate nose, with glossy hair pulled back neatly into a ponytail, had made middle-class Beijingers stop and stare. She looked like them, or maybe their daughter. ‘She needs money for the baby,’ said another woman, and threw down a ten-yuan note. ‘Xie xie,’ said the girl in a quiet voice. I followed the woman’s lead and offered ten yuan. ‘Thank you,’ she said in English. More women threw down small offerings, but most in the crowd walked away after reading her plea for money

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to buy a ticket back home. It wasn’t their problem; there were so many migrants in the city these days. A mob of red-faced provincial construction workers, sweat-stained and grimy, leered as they passed. I walked off too. The girl’s crumpled ticket showed she needed two hundred and fifty yuan to get to Guangzhou. As I headed in the direction of home, I mused that this was fifty dollars to an Australian, which would stretch to two Toby shirts or pay for a meal I’d planned as my final farewell in the atmospheric Siheyuan restaurant that overlooked the Forbidden City’s moat. Small pleasures in yuppie heaven Beijing. But it was a huge and impossible fortune to an unemployed girl from out of town. Not having it, and not being able to get on that train, could be life-altering. Why had I walked away? I wondered where she slept at night. Ten minutes later, I went back. I wanted to talk to her. The sticky-beak crowd had swollen, making it difficult to enter the clothes stores opposite. I elbowed past and crouched down beside her. ‘Xiaojie . . .’ I began to ask. But a police officer in grey uniform rushed up behind me and kicked her placard and train ticket across the footpath. The officer ordered her to get up, and reached over to grab her small pile of possessions. Her legs were folded under her body, and as she tried to move I noticed they were shaking and she had difficulty getting up. I offered her my hand. ‘That’s my friend,’ I told the officer. He was incredulous, but backed off. I picked up her bag and we were allowed

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to walk away. The officer followed us a short distance to make sure we left the shopping area. ‘You want to go to Guangzhou?’ I asked her in Chinese as we walked, slowly because she was stiff and still shaking. ‘I want to go home,’ she replied. ‘Now?’ ‘Now.’ I didn’t know whether I might have made her situation worse by interfering with the police. She told me she was five months pregnant and had come to Beijing because she was unmarried, in trouble, and everyone said it was the city where life was better. A child born here, with a Beijing hukou, or residence card, entered a life of comparative privilege. She was twenty-four and had spent all her money on a train ticket to the other end of China, because running away was going to cure her woes. But the reality had been horrifying. No company would hire a pregnant girl—why had she thought they would? She had found herself living on the streets. Without a job and a permanent address there wouldn’t be a hukou, and without it, no health care or education for the baby. She had no friends in Beijing; no one to fall back on. She was one of 150 million migrants adrift in the cities. Her name was Yu Ting, and she spoke with soft dignity. I was automatically walking towards Beijing central railway station. She didn’t know the city at all, but remembered she had been told the long-distance train she needed left from Beijing West.

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‘I don’t know where that is,’ I said. I asked a Beijinger in a suit rushing out of one of the big Jianguomen hotels for directions. ‘You can catch a bus to the other side of town, but a taxi would be quicker,’ she suggested. We walked over to the taxi rank outside the hotel foyer. The first two red Xiali drivers refused to accept us, a foreigner and a pregnant migrant carrying a blue Pepsi bag. A black taxi, the premium two-dollar a kilometre variety, drove up and opened his door. ‘Let’s go,’ I said to Yu Ting. She slid into the back seat next to me, amused. ‘You arrived in Beijing by plane, so you would travel by taxi.’ To her, a train fare could make or break things, and the irony of the world of difference between us wasn’t lost. Our driver pulled out into the traffic and we settled in for a long ride. ‘My sister-in-law in Sydney is expecting a baby soon, too.’ ‘If I can get back to Guangzhou, I can make it back to my home town and my family.’ ‘Do you want to go back to your family?’ I wondered what had made her flee in the first place, and who and where the baby’s father was. ‘They will look after me in Guangzhou. I have friends there.’ It was a clear, blue-sky day. Beijing was putting on a show of brilliant colour, and in this sort of weather it was easy to forget that the city could also be a grey, harsh place. ‘The wind has driven the pollution away,’ she said, reading my thoughts.

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I noticed her fingernails were immaculately clean and her black sneakers an imitation of the leather kind that were currently fashionable across the city. She said she was a university graduate. The taxi driver asked her why we were going to Beijing West Station, and how we knew one another. It must have been an odd sight, although we weren’t that far apart in age. ‘We are going to buy a ticket.’ ‘Eh?’ ‘It’s a big ticket.’ He looked us over in the rear-view mirror and commented slyly, ‘Just small change for laowai, huh?’ ‘What! Not at all,’ she snapped, springing to my defence. I said nothing, playing the deaf mute, but thought about why I was doing this, playing sister charity. Hard-luck stories and poverty abounded in this city. A pack of street kids roamed the red mosaic-tiled footpath between the Jianguomen subway stop and Silk Alley. The oldest was a girl of maybe ten who herded them past Pizza Hut, Starbucks and the Friendship Store. They held hands to cross the road, and tried to obey the traffic warden when the woman protectively whistled and waved her flag, but their wild energy couldn’t be constrained. They would burst across the road after only a moment’s pause, causing buses and taxis to swerve. They dove into rubbish bins to find empty soft-drink cups to beg with. Dressed in tiny dirty rags with frazzled short hair they picked their targets with bull’s-eye accuracy—tourists and foreigners who clutched their handbags too tightly, or nervously carried rucksacks on their stomachs. The city had set up a temporary shelter

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for street children this summer. But it wasn’t a solution; more would come. Looking at shoes in Oriental Plaza that morning, I had smiled to see an old, weather-worn rural worker with a stubbled face wandering around in awe. He was clad in cloth shoes and a soiled Mao jacket. It wasn’t quite the look of a kid in a candy store, because he couldn’t buy a thing, and couldn’t comprehend this place of handbags, floor-to-ceiling glass and English signage. But Yu Ting was enough like me to scare me. And she was on the brink, about to fall into one or the other of two very different Chinas. Our taxi pulled into the station. We queued in the ticket hall, and when our turn came Yu Ting whispered into the microphone at the counter and told the woman where she wanted to go. There were two trains departing that day. Yu Ting selected the afternoon train. Before I handed over the money to pay, she insisted on carefully rechecking the details and the name of the destination on the computer screen. The last thing she needed was to jump on the wrong train and end up penniless somewhere else. I took back the change from three hundred yuan, and handed Yu Ting the precious red ticket. She gripped my hand tightly with both of her hands. ‘Xie xie, xie xie,’ she repeated. I put my arm around her shoulder and gave her a hug, in that Western way that we dish out intimacy so lightly to near strangers, and wished her luck. •

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When it was time for me to say goodbye to Beijing it was difficult. I had grown used to a new kind of normal in this city. It was easy to live on the adrenaline of constant change and stimulation. Just to watch it rush by was enough. Little groups of women, small dogs, kite-flyers and bird men congregated in the driveway of Allison’s high-rise home on the Second Ring Road, giving it a charm that Western high-rise living so often lacks. Their hutong may have been demolished, but these Beijing residents had brought the old ways firmly with them when they were moved into glossy new apartments. I passed Workers’ Stadium, where the old men were at it, loudly crashing cymbals and banging drums. They stood in a half-circle, dressed in their undershirts, gathered around a pitchfork twirling dancer of the same age with a long, greying pigtail. People stopped to watch, and the old men were appreciative of the audience. People only stopped in Sydney to watch buskers, and you were obliged to pay for that. These old men wouldn’t think of it. To them, it was part of being in a community, a social contribution that didn’t come with a price tag attached. I walked further, past the stadium gates, and came across a dozen elderly ladies vigorously engaged in what seemed to be a cross between tai chi and tennis. They twirled badminton racquets, balancing tennis balls that didn’t drop during the long, smooth dancing movements. In the subway, a middle-aged man in an office shirt broke into song on the escalator. I was travelling up, he was travelling down. I smiled and he waved back.

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These were the things that I would miss the most about Beijing. With thirty-three kilograms of luggage checked in with no problems, I sat waiting in the departure lounge of the International Airport. It could have been any airport anywhere in the world, save the stuffed pandas in silk shirts in the souvenir shop and the hardcover Edgar Snow biography weighing heavily on my knee. It was published by the China Society for People’s Friendship Studies, was the size of a brick, and part of a recent government series about ‘correct’ eyewitnesses to the People’s Liberation. It was the only light reading I could find in English in the local bookshop that morning. Snow was an American who had famously written Red Star Over China in 1937, another of the great ‘friends of China’ who had told the world about Mao. The book’s preface was dated 2003. ‘There have been others who viewed China and the Chinese people through glasses tinted by hostile prejudice or ignorance and have invariably made irrelevant observations that could not stand the test of time’, it warned, before going on to quote Chairman Mao. I realised I had arrived in China with rose-tinted glasses, but was leaving without them. I reckoned no observation could stand the time-test these days, when Chinese time brought such frantic change. Just as Beijing’s skyline was being knocked down and rebuilt, so too were the stories in this city. My mobile phone beeped and glowed. It was a text message from Allison. She was staying on for another summer at least, maybe more.

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‘Come back soon!’ read the text. I hoped that I would. As long as the re-emerging Middle Kingdom kept up its pace, with ‘Chinese characteristics’, I knew I couldn’t keep away.

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Acknowledgments Acknowledgements Thank you to Asialink and the Australia–China Council for the opportunity to work in Beijing through the Medialink exchange program. Many thanks also to China Daily, the Foreign Experts, Richard Walsh, the Red Gate Gallery in Beijing, Allison, Patrick and all of my patient Chinese teachers and classmates over the years in Sydney.