The Customer Is Always Wrong

I’ll start with corrections. Apparently there is a jogging scene here, it just takes place at different hours. I have a luxury morning schedule and can go running at 9AM when most people are working, that is why I never have company when running, or so I have been told. Next, about people asking for money. Around the Buddhist temple some people do without tuning it into a song and dance routine or a sales pitch. Many of them have disabilities and I wonder if this somehow makes it more accepted.

I am slowly finding more people to do language exchanges with. I have two regular partners at the moment, one an artist and the other an accountant. As well as getting me more accustomed to speaking and listening, the meetings have also have the benefit of taking me to other parts of the city. I recently heard from two more people looking to exchange so I think with them I will more or less have enough people to let me have an hour of Chinese practice every day in addition to the work I do by myself.

Yesterday I went to my first ‘English Corner’ which was held in a centrally located protestant church. English corners are places where people go to practice speaking English. I thought that if I went I could be useful to somebody as I am a native speaker, and maybe I could meet people willing to exchange. It turned out to be somewhat different from what I had expected. It certainly was a in one respect a way for people to practice their English, but it was also in another, a way for the church to spread its message. These two outcomes are not antithetical but neither are they identical so they had to be careful to cover both bases by learning English through memorising scripture and by singing hymns karaoke style.

People drifted in and there were maybe about 30 people present once it got going. There was a ten-minute presentation on Time Management by an American student which contrasted the Western and Chinese approaches to time management in a way I found problematic. Basically he said Westerners create schedules that determine time and Chinese respond to what is happening in a more improvisatory way letting circumstances determine their schedules. This is one of those half-truths that sort of works enough to function but which doesn’t really explain the difference properly as it avoids looking at why this may be and why there may be a necessity to the Chinese way within a Chinese context. What’s more, it generalises people as representatives of their culture. I rather see the ability to determine schedules as being linked to ones power, regardless of which society you are in and also to the degree of to which things are fixed in time more generally around you. If nothing around you is fixed but you insist on fixing things out of habit, it can create pointless conflict. I learnt this working in Croatia one Summer. In any case, without going further into this topic, I was struck by the evangelical missionary side that modern business management can take on when presented here.

In spite of the time management talk the English Corner was actually quite an unusual and even amusing event for me to drop in upon and I met some friendly people there who I will see again. I even have a new exchange partner from this so on the linguistic level the English Corner certainly worked for me. I doubt however that I’ll become a regular churchgoer as a result of it but, like I said, the twin goals are nether antithetical nor identical.

Speaking of time management, I am conscious of how I am diving my time between language learning, city/self observation, cultural background research, artistic documentation and active searching for an artistic form to contain this within. Right now I am privileging language learning as that can feed all the other activities and make my stay here a richer one. At some point the balance will shift and I’ll have to put a performance together in a more urgent way.

I’ve been trying classify what I am looking at in a way that might be useful for me to do something with it. This is very early days but I have come up with one category that makes sense for me. I could broadly call this images of Westerners in Xiamen. It is useful for me to have this information as it within this matrix that I will be placed.

So, looking back upon the blog, I could for example put the Westerner’s bars and cafes into this category. The twenty or so Western films that are granted distribution rights in China could be added too. I saw to my dismay that Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes was one of last year’s along with Harry Potter. Walking around the train station yesterday I came across a Tesco and a Walmart and an incongruous Arsenal shop. On the musical side it gets more depressing still. The other day I heard the Backstreet Boys booming out from a sports shoe store. I know for a fact that they are big here because I had the strange experience last year of watching them live in concert in Beijing. They pretty much filled the national basketball stadium. I may have to return to them at a later point as they were notable for being able to neither sing nor dance well and now, over 15 years on from their emergence as a fresh faced boy band, they are not even cute in the dumb sort of way they were. It was truly astonishing to see up close something so bad be so popular. Anyway, to return to Westerners, from this perspective what travels most efficiently is corporate culture for mass distribution. I should add that I have also seen a small number of actual Westerners in these two weeks, many of them attached in one way or another to the University. I shall have to monitor, refine and expand this category.

Another category is street performances. Yesterday I was on a very crowded bus and caught out the corner of my eye the sight of a person by the side of the road with a wooden box on their head twisting from side to side. I got out at the next stop and rushed back to see more. It turned out to be a balancing and contortionist act set up on the pavement. It had pretty much finished but there was still a young girl busy with a metal tube.

I learnt last night why the beggar and boy I saw may have been as striking as they were. Apparently begging has been made illegal meaning that people practicing it must, at least ostensively, perform an act or sell something. It may have been this restriction that had the effect of theatricalising them, though it is hard to say that it in any way changed its essence.

I got talking in the street to a Korean man yesterday. He was in Xiamen for a few days on a business trip. His employer, a major electronics company has put him on a year-long placement in Shanghai to learn the language and be able to do his sales work in China. I think they, like everybody else, are thinking about getting a footing into this new and expanding market. He reeled off an impressive list of about 20 Chinese cities he had visited in the last year, and we got talking about how it was to be a foreigner in China. He said that while he could now speak reasonable Chinese he still couldn’t understand his hosts’ way of thinking. He said that at night in particular they became different people. At this I had to wonder if he would have a significantly different experience in England, but I had to let that one go.

We arrived at the water and walking in front of us was a young Chinese woman with a digital camera in hand taking pictures over the bay. I joked to him ‘there’s another customer for you’ she exemplifying the younger, middle-class consumer. He looked slightly puzzled for a moment then replied ‘no I think I am her customer’.

He obviously had different new markets he was thinking of breaking into than those I was alluding to. The conversation then moved seamlessly onto Chinese girls, how they were, and how much they cost. His experience as a travelling salesman obviously stood him in very good stead here and I did the listening in this rather one-sided exchange.

Despite our considerable differences it was interesting for me to also notice how we had some similarities. We are both in one way or another involved in the process of opening China to outside business and culture. As A Korean he did not call himself a Westerner for him the way to mark his difference was say he was from a developed country and China was a developing country. I saw his point but I also saw how parts of Xiamen look very developed by anyone’s definition yet next to them you can sometimes see very primitive homes and businesses that have missed out on the newly acquired wealth. The contrast can at times be huge but if I compare Knightsbridge and Newham I also have to wonder how they too can belong to the same city. I guess there is less far to fall in London but I also see how these terms Western and developed can often obscure genuine poverty and privation on our own doorstep.

Speaking of London, I received a rather random invitation to write an article on the city from an upscale Chinese travel magazine. They will translate it for their national readership. I completed it this morning and sent it off so with any luck that should be my first step into publishing in China. Somehow these sort of random invitations seem more likely to happen here than in the UK where things proceed in a more predictable way within the cultural field. When I do performances in the UK I more or less know the places I am likely to work in, what sort of people will come, the type of responses I will get, and so on. Here it feels more fluid, as if the cultural field has not settled into set positions but is instead in motion. The UK has had its recent changes with the new government and their policy of heavy arts cuts but even that feels more stable than what I sense here. I could be wrong and only time will tell but this does feel like a very important period in the cultural life of China, and as such I feel privileged to be able to witness it from my position as a returning visitor and indeed to participate in it in my own small way.

With the other two artists in residence here at CEAC I went to The Blind Massage Centre of Ming Ai Xiamen. I can’t honestly say whether it was a pleasant experience or not, I’m still digesting it. It began with wooden tubs being brought in and my feet being soaked in hot herbal water. Three blind massagers then came in and sat down in front of us and proceeded to do the foot massage. None of them spoke any English and neither of my companions spoke any Chinese so I was rapidly elevated to becoming the translator, a role I am so not fit for. The foot massage lasted an hour and during this time I was on the receiving end of a variety pains that I never knew could exist in the feet. At the end my feet certainly felt different but relaxed is not the word I would use to describe them. I suspect that was not the point. Next came the body massage for which we remained partially clothed. Here the conversation sparked up and they were eager to know where we were from and a bit more about us. As has already happened on a number of occasions in the last two weeks I was asked my age, a question one rarely gets asked in Britain. I was also told I was too thin. The body massage was less painful than the foot massage, though it had its moments too when she got to my lower back. Also an hour in length, I got up feeling altered.

After paying and whilst waiting in the lobby I had another size moment. One of the men who had been massaging us came up to me to measure himself against me, comparing both height and shoe size. I think I must have had a highly untypical body shape and size to them and they wanted to properly check the dimensions of this tall thin Westerner. On the way out, opposite the lifts, there was a picture of another tall thin Westerner. He is quite popular here I believe.

Over the last few months I’ve been looking at street performers and trying to understand their acts both artistically and technically as I suspect I will also be doing some of my performances outdoors. While I very much doubt I will be juggling or doing Beatles covers I think there is much to learn from watching street performers, both in terms of what to do and how to do it and just as much in terms of what to avoid.

Yesterday I saw my first street performers in Xiamen. It was a free, outdoor musical comedy act performed by and largely for older people. From a technical point of view I was immediately attracted to it, they had placed loudspeakers in the trees and had arranged plastic chairs for the spectators. The location was ideal, it was a park by the ferry terminal and it was full of older people playing cards, drinking tea, chatting and waiting to be entertained. Much as I like the space, I doubt I will do a show here as I suspect I would be perceived as an intrusion, being both Western and under 40.

While not exactly a performer in the same sense, I also saw a man begging for money who had an extremely simple and efficient technical set up and an incredibly dramatic ‘act’. I am nervous of aestheticising away his desperate reality but I do have to note how well he was doing what he was doing from a purely visual point of view.