Arrived in Xiamen yesterday. The flight with Hainan Airlines down here was slightly late but uneventful. They are apparently much improved these days, but still have the look and feel of a budget airline, though not in the same way as a European one. Rather than the garish cabins and incessant promotional messages of say, Ryanair, Hainan Airlines’ planes feel worn in like a pair of comfortable shoes and the music playing was a pan pipe cover of Imagine. Just under three hours later I was on the south coast.
Everyone I met in Xiamen was complaining that it was cold but coming from Beijing where the rivers were frozen solid it seemed just fine to me. On the subject of Chinese pessimism, an earlier point of mine, one of the people I had dinner with that evening said that this Winter would be a particularly bad one with no respite whatsoever. I can only say that I hope he was speaking as a pessimist and will not prove to be accurate in his prediction. Dinner was good and I met the other resident artists and people around CEAC.
The apartment is comfortable and has a view over the sea. The neighbourhood is modern and not quite like anything I know. Before I say anything more I shall have to observe who lives and works here in a little more detail. There are one or two things that mark me as a visitor. The furniture is quite traditional Chinese, that is to say hard and wooden. In order to be comfortable on it you have to sit very properly. It has been adapted somewhat to Western tastes by previous residency artists. The shower is also quite comical, as you can see. I have noticed that while I am tall in most places at 1 meter 89 cm, I am taller, relatively speaking, here. More so even than in Beijing where I saw young men my height on the subway. Here however, I am clearly more than just on the tall side, I am ‘not from here’ tall. I shall have to look out for ways this is manifest in daily life beyond the shower cubicle…
Walked through the centre of Beijing, around the forbidden palace. Haven’t done this since 1997 when I was first in China. It has, on the face of it, changed less here, at least in terms of architecture. What has changed is the people; there seem to be more than I remember and they are dressed quite differently. There also seems to be more people selling stuff: hats, electronic spinning tops that fire patterns onto the floor, sweets, ‘crawling forces’ and flags.
At first I thought the flags were being given away as I, imagining it was the UK, couldn’t imagine anyone actually paying for a flag when crowding into a central London tourist spot. But no, visitors to the forbidden city buy small flags from the quite persistent flag vendors as a part of the experience. I’m curious to know what these flags signify, what meaning beyond that of the country’s symbol these flags convey. I expect that this is a very complex and varied set of meanings, in the same way as what the St George’s Cross signifies is contested and unstable. I have a better understanding of the latter having grown up with it and watched its evolution from solely adorning seriously dodgy pubs to becoming a more varied and acceptable symbol within the commercial world. What the Chinese flag symbolises is however a mystery.
I’m fighting through so much jet lag that i cannot even tell if I am early or late, I am simply opposite having come from the US. It is good to be at the Institute for Provocation’s guest apartment, up on the 20th floor overlooking the 2nd ring road. This is a familiar spot from my stay in 2009 and a good place to reorient myself.
Chance took me to a wedding reception and video screening last night. It was a relatively informal event in a cafe/bar in the fashionable Nan luo gu xiang area and it was mostly for friends of the bride and groom. They had already held two ceremonies for their families, one in Northern China and one in Germany, so this was more a presentation of the documentation sort of affair than anything else.
I become very curios about it as I have recently read how wedding videos are a growth market here with professionally produced videos retelling episodes from the couple’s romance by re-enacting scenes, often mixing some of the real people with extras hired to make up the scenes. The video tonight however was a more homemade affair but no less interesting to the outside observer for that.
From what I could make out, the wedding was a traditional Chinese one with many different rituals needing to be performed: walking over a fire, carrying the bride, archery and of course speeches. What I found curious was the absence of a priest. There was a master of ceremonies who kept it moving along but no priest invested with the authority of God or official with the authority of the state as far as I could make out.
The video lasted about 40 minutes, during which food arrived, drinks flowed and special wedding cigarettes were smoked. The screening over and the film talked over in detail, the party geared up with a three piece band doing blues covers striking up. I found the jet lag creeping up upon me however and with eyes struggling to stay open it was time to bid the couple farewell and make my way back to the apartment.
I believe I was the only non-chinese person at the reception other than the groom himself. He quickly recognised me as the other laowai and remarked up this. This term laowai is kind of interesting as it is the Chinese word for foreigner and it seems to be quite often used with ambiguous intent. There is a simple introduction to it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laowai
As a visitor this is one of my labels, Westerner a slightly more specific other and British a further still. I suspect that most of the time I fall into the first two categories the final elaboration being somewhat a detail.
Turkish Airlines conducted me safely to Beijing which after the Air France / KLM runaround made me feel quite grateful for basic efficiency and courtesy. My travelling companion seated beside me was a private security contractor on his way to Iraq. When he described the work he was stepping back into (along with about 10 other large British men in their 30s also on this flight) it made me feel very grateful that I was heading to a peaceful place to pursue work I enjoyed. It is easy to take things for granted and get wound up by the Lindas of this world, missing the bigger picture.
Jimmy was quite a lot more cultured and worldly wise than I had imagined ex-army Afghan vets to be and I was glad to have these expectations of mine broken. He understood the thrust of The Customer Is Always Wrong when I described it to him and related it to his world of working with Americans and Iraqis. Where it became interesting was when he said how the British forces tended to be far more cynical about the operation than the American forces and this made me wonder which was the better and which the worse: to fight in bad faith or to pursue folly wholeheartedly?
Perhaps the issue is to what extent is the famed British sense of irony simply a defensive mechanism that does little to change ones course of action but rather is something that protects one from the results of actions, whether they be positive or negative.
I read this morning that the British are among the most pessimistic people in the world today, topped by only the Italians and Belgians. Unfortunately reading further it became clear that the idea of pessimism was one restricted to economics: pessimistic about making purchases or about job security. This made me wonder if there could be a wider index of pessimism, of half empty/ half full thinking on a broader level. I shall have to look into Chinese pessimism to see what sort of shape it takes. In the economic survey the Chinese came out pretty positively though they were topped by the Brazilians, but do those statistics say anything about a wider frame of mind? This is something I shall be interested to look into.
