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A Belated Farewell to China

: A different kind of wealth.

[I thought this post would be a farewell to Seoul. Instead, it wanted to be something I should have written three years ago, when I ended my six years in Shanghai. It won. I'll say bye to Korea later. And isn't writing a wonderful thing.]

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It’s probably normal to hit a “regrets” stage when you close out your time in a foreign land. All the things you didn’t do, didn’t appreciate, didn’t explore. I’m certainly there. I leave Seoul for Singapore in a month, the next strange chapter in this stranger’s life.

I’ve made no secret over the last three years about my luke-warm to icy feelings regarding Korea. But really, Korea never had a fair shake with me. I came here after six years in Shanghai, for crying out loud, one of the most friendly and colorful and dynamic and blessedly cheap metropolises in the world. I learned enough Mandarin while there to be able to engage the Shanghainese in surprisingly meaty conversations, with the added entertainment value for my Chinese interlocutors that I carried them out with the vocab and grammar of a four-year-old. Learning babyspeak made it fun to be a stupid foreigner there.

And then there’s the fact that for China, a swarm of foreigners is a new experience. The Chinese borders were closed to the world until very recently, so we foreigners are items of extreme exoticism and curiosity there. And Shanghai and the other big cities have also seen an influx of migrants from the under-developed central and western regions of China – peasants who have never seen a weiguoren, a “white devil.” Bonus points if you’re of African descent: I’ve known such people who’ve told me the Chinese walked up to them and, without a word, touched their skin and hair in wonder.

All of this, in a word, makes living in China as a foreigner a constant form of play.

And then there’s the flip side: China’s 50-year isolation after the Communist Revolution means that it’s blessedly non-Westernized. Away from the tourist and shopping districts in the cities’ shiny new centers, in the traditional city neighborhoods, the city outskirts, the small towns and villages, and the countryside, there are no signs of Western civilization consumerism. No Starbucks or Burger Kings or damnable WalMarts or Gaps. Instead, there are mom-and-pop markets, farmers’ markets, noodle shops, karaoke bars, fabric markets full of tailors, foot-rub and massage parlors. There are as many bicycles as cars in this purer, disappearing China – and these bicycles, often ancient, battered, rickety and wobbly, are a breed far removed from the status-conscious Treks and whatnots that would cost many Chinese a full year’s salary. Grandmas and grandpas ride these old bikes as their primary form of transportation, their “cars.” Young couples ride them tandem, the beau pedaling and his girl sitting primly sidesaddle on the rear rack, on sunny days topped by a lovely umbrella to shield her fair skin from the sun. They ride slowly, often well-dressed, and you can hear them conversing as they go. They often stare or doubletake at you as they glide by. “Weiguoren….hallo!” Toothy smiles. Play.

Grandmas squat on the sidewalk with their squatting grandchildren, steadying them so they can pee on the sidewalk without mishap. It’s normal – and really, foreigner, relax. How dirty can baby-pee be? Mothers carry their babies in jumpers designed to expose their bottoms, a daily parade of babies’ butts. Barber shops full of migrant peasant girls staring out the windows, almost never working, instead watching TV or chatting and eating together, or napping. They’ll take you upstairs and give you an hour’s massage for ten bucks. Sometimes “massage” is more broadly defined than it is in the West, without seeming seedy at all. The moral world is different here too, much more accepting and far less ashamed of Nature. If massages are to relax all of the body, the thinking seems to go, then it only makes sense that the whole body be massaged.

And the wonder of the public parks in China: already at six a.m. they’re alive. Grandmas in military formation under a willow, led by a grandma with a ghetto-blaster playing traditional Chinese folk songs. They dance with swords, red fans, red scarves that fly in synchronous arcs as the old gals twirl. Grandpas carry their pet birds or crickets in bamboo cages, hang them on low tree branches, and sit under them with other grandpas on portable stools. Rainbow bridges arc over their upside-down reflections in the canals. The willows rustle, the birds sing. Peasants beat the sun to lay their daily harvest on the sidewalk, barter with the locals buying their daily vegetables. They weigh them on notched bamboo sticks suspended by a string, with counterweighing stones on one end. The big smiles, the missing teeth, the bowed backs from decades in the fields. The thatched hats.

The neighborhood park is also a free gym. More grandmas and grandpas, fathers and mothers, teens and children swarm the simple machines for their daily workout. They wear leather dress shoes with cheap gym suits or pajamas – pajamas, you’d been told, are a status symbol, since owning a pair means you have money to spare. They wear dress shirts and pants, they wear anything and everything as they do their sit-ups and back-stretches and presses. You see your neighbor – the one who had the chicken tethered to his front patio for several days until yesterday, when you happened by as he was wringing its neck in preparation for the night’s dinner – doing pull-ups. The sun is still not yet up.

After the sun goes down, these people fill the park for different activities. Young couples sit on its hillocks in the dark, next to the reflective pond and mechanical waterfall, away from their crowded apartments, to feast on their privacy together. Young and old alike fill the park’s circular center plaza, where yet another grandma with a boom-box fills the twilit sky with ballroom dance music. Old and young waltz, foxtrot, tango; they do it man with woman, man with man, woman with woman, young with old. They do it with four-year-olds. They see the weiguoren and pull him out to shake a leg, laughing at his baby-talk with those smiles, those missing teeth, those other perfections.

Looking at all of these people – the ancient ones most of all – it dawns on you that you, of all the foreigners teaching at your school and living in this neighborhood at the edge of Shanghai’s sprawl, may be the luckiest. Unlike you, they’ve been teaching algebra, or physics, or literature or phys. ed., while you, blessedly, have been teaching the history of China – the history of these very people dancing around you, dancing with you, at the park. Looking into the old folks’ bright and wizened eyes, at the lacework lining their faces, you’re struck by the fact that these very same people so happy around you now lived, decades ago, through the hardships of the Civil War, the Japanese Invasion, the Great Leap Forward, the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution. How many of them have seen starvation, war, re-education, labor camps? How many loved ones have they lost – or been betrayed by? And yet here they are now, leading you in a dance whose steps finally, after a century-long nightmare, are light and joyous. Christ, the presence of old Chuang-tse laughing down the Tao, and of the imperturbable old Buddha mindful that this too shall pass – both are palpable in them all.

All of this, in a word, makes living in China as a foreigner a constant encounter with a truly different world. These people, with their cramped, dingy apartments and their dates on their battered old bicycles, with their bad teeth and their conspicuous pajamas, with their $100 a month incomes – they are poor, looked at with one set of eyes. But looked at through different eyes, that see wealth in terms unrelated to income, they’re among the richest people I’ve ever known.

If I ever have the chance to live there again, I’ll probably take it. No country – America included, America especially – has ever suited me like China has. If that luck doesn’t come my way, I count myself among the blessed for the experience. I know that’s sentimental, but it’s no less true for that.