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.
