Yesterday the holiday continued and I saw one of the people from the compound walking her piglet. It was an unruly, spirited little creature that had her running around this way and that. Now I don’t know which category quite to file this under, other than the plain daft. Maybe if I have to force a category out I can consider this as the Chinese middle class catching up and in places surpassing the West in terms of fashions. Is that a category? Not really, at least not yet.
Things that were of greater obvious interest to my work were the observations on personal space. When taking the bus and being out and about I have noticed how I have a general sense of being among a greater density of people that I am accustomed to. Coming from a low, flat, wide, low-density city (relatively speaking) to a more built up and densely packed city this difference is clear. I get the feeling that space has a relation to class, as it does in most places, but more than that, that space feels more like a series of compartments rather than free flowing expanses. It is as if I have a greater awareness of boundaries. The exceptions here are the beaches and the mountains which are also a feature of Xiamen. What is more, Xiamen is relatively relaxed from what I see of other Chinese cities and it makes a comparison even possible. Shenzhen on the other hand seemed like such a different vision of a city that a comparison is barely possible.
I was looking at the way that the vast majority of infants are carried in public rather than pushed in chairs as they are in the West. One of my artist colleagues had a theory for this that it leaves a lasting effect on the child. This may be true. For my part I was mostly interested in the mechanics of carrying, studying how they are lifted and held, how the little ones hold on and how they are displayed.
We had an artist’s dinner in the evening and presented some of our work to one another in a salon type atmosphere. It was quite satisfying to have this opportunity to engage on a more than simply social level. To the dinner I brought an item I had been saving for a special occasion: a traditional British Christmas pudding. Incongruous though it was, the pudding together with the other Western dishes served were pleasant reminders of more familiar foodstuffs. Not that I pine for them, I don’t, but they have acquired a nostalgia they never previously had. For this dinner there were no goose feet or snake liquors anywhere in sight though some of the more adventurous omnivores amongst us traded strange food experiences, the silk worm cocoons being to my mind the winner.
